Packet Replay

disk2n

10 Gigabit Network Traffic (Re)Player

disk2n captures full-sized network packets at multi-Gigabit speeds (over 10Gbps on supported hardware), ensuring lossless packet capture directly from a live network interface. It seamlessly integrates with n2disk™ to replay previously recorded PCAP files for the purposes of high-performance traffic generation and testing.

More Than a Simple Packet Replay Application

  • High Speed Performance Packet Replay

    Achieves line-rate packet replay with optimized inter-packet timing, allowing traffic to be replayed at capture rate or a user-defined speed.

  • Advanced Packet Reforging

    Dynamically modifies source/destination MAC, IP, and ports on the fly, recalculates checksums, and automatically updates multicast destination MAC addresses.

  • Optimized Multi-Core Processing

    Designed for high-performance environments, leveraging a three-thread architecture to maximize efficiency in reading, transmission, and timing.

  • Accelerated Packet Transmission

    Utilizes PF_RING ZC acceleration and Direct-IO disk access to ensure maximum throughput and minimal latency in packet replay.

  • Standard PCAP Support

    Works with industry-standard PCAP file formats, supporting both regular and nanosecond timestamps for precise packet capture and replay.

  • Fully Configurable

    Custom settings to meet specific needs, including packet replay speed, reforging options, and capture formats.

n2disk™ to disk2n

disk2n is able to replay network traffic previously captured with n2disk on live networks observing the original inter-packet time. disk2n supports the industry standard PCAP file format (with both regular and nanosecond timestamps).


disk2n has been designed to replay multiple pcap files of any size (even terabytes of traffic) with limited memory usage. You can specify a playlist of pcap files or a timeline produced by n2disk with a time interval, and instruct disk2n to continue from the first packet when the last one is reached. It is possible to determine in advance the amount of memory used by disk2n: it uses a memory buffer of arbitrary size to cache the next packets to replay, achieving great transmit performances with limited memory usage.

Reproduce selected long-term network activities.

Replay previously captured traffic to a different network interface.

Generate traffic to test network equipments that no traffic generator can do being them usually limited in replay duration.

Performance

Low Performance

Packet Size (Bytes) disk2n Sustained Throughput
disk2n with PF_RING ZC
Fixed 64 Wire Rate
Fixed 128
Fixed 512
Random 64-1500

System Configuration

  • OS: Ubuntu 12.04
  • CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) E5-2643 @ 3.50GHz
  • Motherboard: Supermicro X9DRW
  • Memory: 16 GB
  • Card: Intel PCIe 82599 10 Gigabit
  • Disks: 12x 1TB 10K RPM SATA
  • Command used:
    n2disk -i zc:eth1 -o /storage/ -p 1024 -b 4096 -q 1 -C 4096 -S 0 -c 1 -w 2disk2n -i zc:eth1 -A /storage/timeline -c 1 -w 2 -S 3 -g -b 2048 -C 4096 -B “2014-03-11 16:14:50” -E “2014-03-11 16:18:00

License

Licensee’s use of this software is conditioned upon acceptance of the terms specified by ntop.

Operating Systems

Linux

disk2n Options

You can test disk2n as binary package (it is part the n2disk package) or get a permanent license.

NOTE

Test reports have been measured on Linux in the worst-case conditions (64 byte packets)

  • Replay speed depends on your disk setup and server being used.

  • You can use disk2n as software application or embedded on the nBox recorder.

  • Research and non-profit organizations can have disk2n at no cost. Please contact us for details.

  • Max Replay Speed

    10 Gigabit

    Linux

    Enhanced PF_RING Support (i.e. full packet transmission acceleration)

    Unix / OSX / Win32

    Basic libpcap-based packet transmission. Available upon request.