Napatech enables virtualized appliances

“Virtualization has proven highly successful in consolidating multiple applications and workloads on fewer servers. This helps reduce space and power consumption and thereby cost. The Napatech virtual appliances solution brings the benefits of virtualization to OEM vendors’ network appliances for network monitoring and analysis, test and security by allowing several virtual network appliances to share data captured by the Napatech network adapter”, said Erik Norup, President Napatech Inc.

The Napatech virtual appliance solution is based on VMware’s ability to transfer large amounts of data in real-time between virtual machines. This allows a single Napatech network adapter to be installed in a standard server serving multiple monitoring and analysis applications. Each appliance application is installed on a virtual machine with the same environment and operating system that is used in the individual appliances. A Napatech data distribution virtual machine is responsible for sharing and distributing captured data to each appliance virtual machine. This allows the same captured data stream to be shared amongst several appliance applications at once.

“There are a number of advantages to this approach”, added Norup. “Firstly, it allows existing network appliance applications to be ported quickly and easily to a virtual environment without any changes to the application. Secondly, it allows diverse environments and operating systems to be supported on the same server. Thirdly, it allows legacy appliances to be quickly upgraded to support higher speed interfaces. Finally, for low-throughput or single-threaded applications it allows several instances of the application to be installed on the same server allowing a quick and easy path to higher throughput performance.”