Napatech Brings Intelligence To Network Monitoring

As more services transition to 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps IP networks, the importance of network monitoring and analysis is increasing – but so are the demands on intelligence and processing capabilities. By using Napatech’s family of network adapters for real-time network analysis, Napatech’s OEM customers can build high performance network appliances providing new levels of intelligence and throughput performance.

“Tunneling is often used in networking to transparently and securely transport data over a Wide Area Network. This is particularly true for value-added services that rely on IP. However, other network adapters used for network monitoring and analysis can only recognize the Ethernet frame and IP header and not the tunneling protocol or encapsulation information. Napatech is the first network adapter vendor to provide visibility into these tunnels for network monitoring and analysis purposes. This combined with our unique ability to intelligently distribute 10 Gbps flows to up to 32 CPU cores in real-time makes it possible to fully monitor and analyze VOIP, VPNs and Mobile Data Networks”, says Erik Norup, President, Napatech, Inc.

Napatech’s network adapters provide sustained full line-rate 1Gbps and 10Gbps throughput per port both on reception and transmission of packets. The adapter recognizes layer 2 through 4 protocols including SCTP, GTP and GRE tunneling protocols, as well as a number of encapsulation methods, such as VLANs, multiple MPLS labels and Cisco ISL. Napatech network adapters can also compute 17 different types of hash-keys, which can be dynamically selected based on the recognized protocol information. Using the computed hash-key or an equal distribution method, flows can be distributed across 32 CPU cores, allowing parallel processing. This allows the application to fully utilize available CPU cores.