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Garland Technology and Capstar Forensics Launch Technology Partnership at Sharkfest ‘16

June 6, 2016

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Buffalo, NY— 
Garland Technology, the leading manufacturer of network TAPs (test access points)CapStar will kick off their technology partnership with CapStar Forensics, innovative creators of a ‘blazing fast’ packet analysis engine at this year’s Sharkfest - the Wireshark Developer and User Conference.

 

Joint Solution to be on display at Sharkfest 2016

The partnership began in early 2016 and is rapidly developing to include joint solutions for CapStar Forensics’ packet analysis engine. In a recent webinar hosted by Love My Tool, Chris Bihary, Garland Technology CEO/Co-Founder and Jim Curtin, CEO/Co-Founder and Jin Qian, CTO/Co-Founder of CapStar Forensics discussed their joint solution that will be on display at this year's Sharkfest - the Wireshark Developer and User Conference.

With Garland Technology’s network TAPs feeding the Capstar Forensics’ platform users receive the benefit of faster mean time to resolution (MTTR) and lower cost per investigation, as well as aggregating two copies of the data for both Capstar and another analyzer like Wireshark.

Capstar and Garland Joint Solution with Aggregation Tap

Feeding the CapStar Solution

“I love partnering with brilliant companies like CapStar,” explains Bihary. “I met Jin, the CTO via Linked In. We were having technical dialog about how TAPs are a better solution than SPAN ports for feeding the CapStar Forensics tool. Of course, I’m a TAP advocate because it’s the only guarantee that you are receiving all of the data.”

With CapStar Forensics platform and Garland's network TAPs the joint solution provides 100% lossless packet capture for forensics and monitoring applications.

“Chris and the Garland team have been great to partner with and we are excited to demo our joint solution - combined with Wireshark at this year’s Sharkfest,” explains Curtin. “Jin and I are big Wireshark fans and to build upon that platform and deliver to the forensics community a solution that is blazing fast with an average of 1 second load time on a 1GB PCAP file is a real crowd pleaser.”

Going to Sharkfest? Then contact Garland for a meeting.
Visit the CapStar Technology Partner page to learn more about these joint solutions.

About CapStar Forensics

CapStar is a highly flexible, very fast network forensic platform for analyzing PCAPs and real-time network data. CapStar can be automated, running a group of analytics against a series of PCAPs in batch saving precious, high-priced investigator's time.

CapStar excels at searching large raw PCAPs blazingly fast, delivering quicker time-to-resolution as well as lower cost per investigation. The centerpiece is the "stateful" scripting enabling extraction of information based on time domain and inter-packet dependencies. The scripting language leverages the relevant protocol field names and syntax of the popular Wireshark platform in a fully programmable way.

The platform comes with 150+ modifiable scripts including "show potential http malware, detect C&C traffic, detect ARP poisoning, overview of all sessions, match threat intel against a given PCAP, show chain of infection and more. For additional information, visit: www.capstarforensics.com

About Garland Technology

Garland Technology guarantees precise data monitoring capabilities with a full line of network access points (TAPs) including: network TAPs that support breakout, aggregation, filtering, regeneration and bypass modes; packet brokering and load balancing; all available in portable or 1U or 2U modular chassis systems. Garland network TAPs support all networks, including copper wire in 10/100M, 10/100/1000M and fiber in 1G, 10G, 40G, 100G. Garland’s network TAPs avoid introducing additional software that could be a point of failure to your network.

Garland’s design and educational-based approach includes a team of network designers to work directly with you and your team to meet your network access and visibility needs and provide you with the best solution for any monitoring or security appliance - allowing you to see every bit, byte and packet®. For more information, visit www.garlandtechnology.com.

See Everything. Secure Everything.

Contact us now to secure and optimized your network operations

Heartbeats Packets Inside the Bypass TAP

If the inline security tool goes off-line, the TAP will bypass the tool and automatically keep the link flowing. The Bypass TAP does this by sending heartbeat packets to the inline security tool. As long as the inline security tool is on-line, the heartbeat packets will be returned to the TAP, and the link traffic will continue to flow through the inline security tool.

If the heartbeat packets are not returned to the TAP (indicating that the inline security tool has gone off-line), the TAP will automatically 'bypass' the inline security tool and keep the link traffic flowing. The TAP also removes the heartbeat packets before sending the network traffic back onto the critical link.

While the TAP is in bypass mode, it continues to send heartbeat packets out to the inline security tool so that once the tool is back on-line, it will begin returning the heartbeat packets back to the TAP indicating that the tool is ready to go back to work. The TAP will then direct the network traffic back through the inline security tool along with the heartbeat packets placing the tool back inline.

Some of you may have noticed a flaw in the logic behind this solution!  You say, “What if the TAP should fail because it is also in-line? Then the link will also fail!” The TAP would now be considered a point of failure. That is a good catch – but in our blog on Bypass vs. Failsafe, I explained that if a TAP were to fail or lose power, it must provide failsafe protection to the link it is attached to. So our network TAP will go into Failsafe mode keeping the link flowing.

Glossary

  1. Single point of failure: a risk to an IT network if one part of the system brings down a larger part of the entire system.

  2. Heartbeat packet: a soft detection technology that monitors the health of inline appliances. Read the heartbeat packet blog here.

  3. Critical link: the connection between two or more network devices or appliances that if the connection fails then the network is disrupted.

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