by Russell Elsner, VP of Product Management
I am thrilled to announce three major advancements within the LiveWire product family. These represent a massive leap in performance and capability continuing LiveWire’s position as the leader in real-time packet analysis and storage.
Software
Over the next few days, LiveAction will release LiveWire 23.2. This release is available to all active maintenance customers and provides many important enhancements. For this blog, I want to feature one in particular: The 23.2 release allows users to enable real-time compression on packet captures. Compression is available for users of existing Core and PowerCore appliances as well as the new generation of Core and PowerCore appliances discussed below.
Compression is a game-changing feature, with massive benefits to both capture speed and capture duration. And the benefits are fairly linear: If the network traffic compresses by 3x, capture to disk speed will increase by roughly 3x. That means that a system with a raw capture rate of 10 Gbps will have an effective capture rate of 30 Gbps, and a LiveWire appliance that used to store packets for 7 days will now store the same packets for 3 weeks. Compression happens in real-time and is lossless
On existing LiveWire systems, compression is impressive. On the new generation of appliances, it is almost magical.
Hardware
With the 23.2 software release, LiveAction is also announcing a new generation of hardware appliances. This generation leverages cutting edge technology to provide a massive leap in processing rate, storage density, and capacity.
- LiveWire Core: 200% more raw storage, 300% faster telemetry for NPM and SecOps.
- LiveWire PowerCore: Up to 375% more raw storage, 350% faster telemetry for NPM and SecOps. Expandable to 6+ Petabytes of effective packet storage.
- LiveWire TeraVault: Storage expansion for PowerCore. Adds 240 TB increments of raw storage.
When the new hardware is paired with the performance optimizations and compression capability of 23.2, the results are astounding. A single PowerCore and TeraVault (4RU in total) can process 60+ Gbps of traffic sending real-time NPM telemetry to LiveNX. This combination can also capture 100+ Gbps of wire data to disk and store it in the 1.4 Petabytes of effective storage. All of this is available in 4 Rack Units!!! This level of performance and density is revolutionary.
LiveWire Grid
LiveWire Grid provides market-leading administration and management for large fleets of LiveWire instances. It allows you to easily manage 100s, or even 1000s, of physical, virtual, or cloud instances of LiveWire.
For network observability, troubleshooting, and forensic analysis, nothing beats access to the raw packets. In a perfect world, you would have packet-level visibility everywhere. However, in the past, ubiquitous packet capture was difficult because the administrative overhead of configuring and managing so many instances was too large. For example, a bank would love to have packet-level visibility at every branch to remotely detect and solve network issues. However, the human cost of keeping 1000s of appliances up could get expensive.
LiveWire Grid was designed to solve this problem. It is explicitly designed to manage massive fleets on LiveWire and provides ubiquitous packet capture with minimal TCO.
Summary
Any one of these announcements would be significant When paired together, they are extraordinary and really do make 2023 the Year of LiveWire!!!
I am incredibly proud of the team and all that they accomplished in the first half of 2023. I am excited to share these new capabilities with our user community. I look forward to even more magic from this team in the next half of the year.
Would you like to learn more? Visit the LiveWire Product Update landing page for more details and resources.
