Affordable 10 Gbps Replay System for Network Testing

With growing deployment of 10 Gigabit networks, and the proliferation of sophisticated network devices designed to work at these high speeds, realistic traffic testing is more important than ever. At 10 Gbps, even small errors or configuration issues can have major performance, security and cost impacts. The ideal test scenario is to capture and record live network traffic, and then to replay it into the devices or networks under test, in a controlled environment and at line rates, to validate operation and performance.

“Capturing, recording and generating 10 Gigabits per second of traffic on a sustained basis are difficult technical challenges, and existing approaches have relied on proprietary hardware and software solutions. However, proprietary 10 Gbps solutions are very expensive, and out of reach for most enterprises, said Peter Shaw, VP Marketing for nPulse. With HammerHead, we have solved this problem using off-the-shelf hardware components combined with Napatech’s adapter, dramatically reducing cost without sacrificing performance.” nPulse employed Napatech's PCI-Express based NT20E network adapter to ensure accurate packet capture and replay performance in HammerHead.

“Napatech’s NT20E provides us with full line-rate 10 Gbps packet capture with zero packet loss and nanosecond precision time-stamping, which are critical for our customers’ applications and we can do this using industry-standard, multi-core server platforms. Napatech technology ensures that these and other packet analysis functions are off-loaded into the adapter hardware, freeing up our host CPUs to focus on the storage, manipulation and retrieval of multi-Terabyte traffic files. Shaw added.

“The nPulse HammerHead is a perfect example of a system that has taken advantage of the throughput and acceleration capabilities Napatech provides to create a product of the highest performance, but at an affordable price. Napatech’s products make it possible to use standard servers, which drastically reduces the time, cost and technical risk of bringing a new system product to market”, said Erik Norup, President of Napatech, Inc.

nPulse Networks' HammerHead provides state-of-the-art 10 Gbps test performance at a fraction of the cost of proprietary alternatives by carefully matching Napatech's standards-based network adapter technology with powerful, off-the-shelf, multi-core server hardware and advanced software tools built in a familiar, widely-supported Linux environment.

The Napatech NT20E 2 x 10 Gbps In-line adapter is designed for accelerating network monitoring system performance through a combination of line-rate 20 Gbps packet capture in real-time and a series of intelligent features designed to off-load the server CPU. These include nanosecond precision time-stamping, port merging, packet decoding, on-the-fly filtering, deduplication and flow identification with intelligent distribution of flows to up to 32 CPU cores.