Additionally, Observer 11 is available as a native Windows 64-bit application, and the company's gigabit and WAN appliances are 64-bit systems.

"The 64-bit platform greatly improves analysis performance," said Douglas Smith, president and co-founder of Network Instruments. "64-bit doesn't just double the speed; it improves it up to eight-fold. As analysis vendors prepare to manage EtherChannel and then 10-gig down the road, our gigabit capture technology, combined with 64-bit Windows, ensures our customers can easily keep up. For us, 64-bit is about maximizing our systems to provide the fastest, most accurate, most efficient analysis possible."

Observer 11 also offers MultiHop Analysis, which tracks up to 10 conversation or transaction hops across a network, a feature for pinpointing bottlenecks, identifying packet loss, and verifying SLAs.

Network Instruments also has announced enhancements to GigaStor, the company's high-capacity storage device designed to capture massive amounts of data -- up to 8TB -- at wire speed. One such enhancement is time-based navigation, which enables administrators to view network performance down to the nanosecond to pinpoint problems. According to Network Instruments, the appliance itself performs data processing and analysis, which means it doesn't need to transfer large quantities of data across the network to the main Observer console for processing.

"It's a new paradigm in network troubleshooting. Unlike competing vendors, the GigaStor has the capability to perform all data processing and analysis locally on the appliance. This eliminates having to transfer large amounts of data across the network for analysis," said Smith. "For example, with other products, it could take days to transfer and analyze only 1 percent of a 4TB capture. With the GigaStor only screen updates are transferred, so analyzing data just takes seconds."