Network appliance with eight NIM slots enables flexible configurations

The CSA-7200 is based on the Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3/v4 workstation platform and offers a highly scalable design in a compact 2U rackmount form factor for packet inspection, firewall, load balancer, network monitoring, security gateway and voice gateway applications. The CSA-7200 includes flexible storage options: three hot-swappable 2.5" SATA drive bays, and two M.2 PCIe/SATA solid-state drives for extra storage. Eight NIM expansion slots and six different NIMs, including 2/4/8/Copper/SFP/SFP+ port types, offer extensive flexibility. An advanced LAN bypass feature allow to set each NIM’s LAN bypass mode individually, through the BIOS or IPMI interface. Additional I/O includes two 10/100/1000 Base-T Ethernet ports, one RJ-45 serial port, two USB 3.0 ports, and one VGA port for graphics.

“OEMs and systems integrators need high performance and scalability to stay competitive. Project managers looking for a complete solution architecture will find that our modularised platform reduces the need for new product development while meeting the future needs of Internet industries,” said Yong Luo, Head of ADLINK’s Embedded Computing Product Segment.

For the high performance requirements of network security applications, the CSA-7200 features the Intel Xeon E5 processor with the Intel C610 chipset and up to 30MB of L2 cache. Twelve 1600/1860/2133 MHz DIMM sockets provide up to 384GB of DDR4 ECC memory.

The CSA-7200 performs data packet inspection for network data transfer and integrates Wind River Titanium Server, as well as other open source software including Intel DPDK, Open vSwitch and nDPI, to facilitate the building of packet parsing applications. The CSA-7200 also includes support for ADLINK PacketManager, which provides the data plane software stack for dynamic Layer 3 forwarding and flow-based forwarding, accelerating application development.

For monitoring, the CSA-7200 offers an intelligent chassis management system that supports SOL for CPU nodes, PSU, and adaptive fan speeds. System management is available through a CLI or web interface and is IPMI 2.0-compliant.

As part of ADLINK’s new MICA platform, the CSA-7200 offers additional options for configuration, giving OEMs and system integrators faster development and a better cost-performance ratio. With the MICA platform, computing, storage, and I/O resources are modularised for flexibility and then recombined as needed for a specific application. Network appliances based on MICA assimilate the latest Internet data center technologies, yet also integrate aspects of traditional ICT (information and communications technology), such as modular architectures, hardware-assisted acceleration, and carrier-grade design standards.

You can see the 4U model of ADLINK’s network appliance next week at Intel Developer Forum, August 16^th-18^th, at West Moscone Convention Center, San Francisco, CA, in our Intel Builders Community Booth 173.