Adapters bring 'intelligence' to network monitoring

The company says that the network adapters have the unique capability to distribute 10Gbp/s flows in real time to up to 32cpu cores based on Ethernet, ip, mpls, layer 4 tunnel information. The network adapters have been designed to provide sustained full line rate 1Gbp/s and 10Gbp/s throughput per port - both on reception and transmission of packets. The adapter recognises 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. According to Napatech, the network adapters can also compute 17 different types of hash keys, which can be dynamically selected based on the recognised protocol information. Using the computed hash key or an equal distribution method, flows can be distributed across 32cpu cores, allowing parallel processing. This allows the application to fully utilise available CPU cores. Erik Norup, Napatech's president, said: "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 recognise 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…makes it possible to fully monitor and analyse voip, vpns and mobile data networks."