Monday, September 20, 2021

Any thoughts on Dualcomm new 10Gbe network TAP? (ETAP-XG)

I'm looking to get a small portable 10Gbe network TAP, for quick ad-hoc network troubleshooting in the field, connected to an analysis laptop/workstation.

Previously, we were using a 1Gbe copper one (SharkTap USB Gen 2).

This basically acts as an inline tap - and then connects to your analysis laptop via USB 3.0, so you can use Wireshark etc. on the packet dumps.

It was basically a low-cost version of something like the Profishark 1G.

I saw that Dualcomm has a new 10Gbe network TAP, which supports SFP+ (so copper or fiber):

https://www.dualcomm.com/collections/network-tap/products/etap-xg-10g-network-tap

What are people's thoughts on Dualcomm, as a network TAP vendor?

This won't be for long-term use in a production network - more for debugging/troubleshooting, or maybe some analysis - so it would in place for hours, to days at most, I would think. (We have passive optical taps for anything long-term).

Dualcomm claims zero packet delay, although I don't know how verifiable that is.

The Dualcomm is $699, whereas the Profishark 10G's I believe are over $10,000.

(I do lose the POE passthrough from the SharkTap, so I guess I'll still keep that in the toolkit).



No comments:

Post a Comment