Aticara PcapStorm Overview

Aticara PcapStorm is a completely virtualized and software based replay tool that can run on any commercial off the shelf (COTS) hardware. PcapStorm is designed by QA and Network Engineers who had a hard time replaying large pcaps, which are regularly received from the field to reproduce customer’s issues in the lab..

Why Aticara?

We are completely software based which can be installed on popular hypervisors on commercial off the shelf (COTS) hardware. It can replay large size pcap with thousands of flows, empowering QA engineers to replicate customer issues in the lab quickly.

Aticara can also be used for amplifying a single flow into millions of flows for load testing the DUT.



Pcap Replay Challenges

Traffic replay is a traditional and effective technique used to emulate real word traffic. Since the recorded traffic used for replay has various protocols, packet sizes, Inter Frame Gap (IFG), Inter Burst Gap (IBG). Recorded traffic has been used for ages to reproduce customer issues in the lab.

There are a lot of open source replay tools available e.g. Tcpreplay, tcpliveplay, and tons of very expensive FPGA based commercial tools.

But still QA Engineers and Network Engineers find it a nightmare to replay voluminous network capture they receive from their customers to replicate crash or bug in the lab.


Salient Features

  • Stateful pcap Replay.
  • Ability to load and replay upto 30,000 pcaps.
  • Ability to replay large pcap ( >=10 GB).
  • Ability to amplify single flows in to millions of flows for load testing.
  • Runs on Commercial Off The Shelf hardware (COTS).
  • Supports commercial hypervisors – ESX, KVM, Openstack.
  • Completely software based solution which can run on COTS.
  • Supports VMware Workstation, Oracle VirtualBox.
  • NAT support.
  • Proxy support.
  • Ability to modify or specify range of MAC address, IP address.
  • VLAN, QinQ support.
  • L7 payload updates for HTTP, CIFS, NFS, SMB, FTP etc.
  • Line Rate Replay – supports 10,25,40,50, 100 Gbps.
  • Identifies and pin points the packet causing crash.
  • Identifies the flow direction (East to West/West to East) causing failures or crash.
  • Ability to create user pcap library of up to 30,000 pcaps.
  • Sequential or parallel pcap replay ability.
  • Generates millions of packets per second.
  • Easy to use and Intuitive Web Based User Interface.
  • Encapsulate payload from pcap with overlay technologies like VXLAN, NVGRE, OpenFlow etc.
  • Ability to replay packets over the air (Wi-Fi Support).
  • Automation Support – TCL, Python, Perl.