Telecom Platform Deployment Featured Article

Napatech today announced in a press release, the launching of a new software suite that was designed to make network appliance development speed increase, as well as less complex. The Napatech (News - Alert) Software Suite also includes new crucial functions that greatly enhance performance of network appliances.

Napatech is an OEM supplier of multi-port 10 GbE and 1 GbE intelligent adapters for real-time network analysis with over 80,000 Ethernet ports deployed. Napatech network adapters provide real-time packet capture and transmission with full line-rate throughput and zero packet loss, with the size of the packet no longer an issue. Intelligent features enable off-load of data traffic processing and packet analysis normally performed in the CPU. This creates a greater amount of processing power available for the network monitoring, analysis, management, test, measurement, security or optimization application being supported

According to the release, the Napatech Software Suite provides both a hardware abstraction and streamlined Application Programming Interface (API) that allows network appliance vendors to quickly and easily take advantage of Napatech’s full range of intelligent network adapters.

Hardware abstraction allows for multiple intelligent network adapters to be combined on a plug-and-play basis using a standard server platform, the release stated. This feature set can be also be offered without the port speed, which allows for flexible 1 G and 10 G port combinations that can be changed as needed.

In addition to the unique and extensive feature set offered in Napatech intelligent network adapters, the Napatech Software Suite also provides for the ability of a data merge of traffic from various network adapters into a single stream. This makes multiple network adapters appear as one large multi-port network adapter. Also, the data sharing function allows this single stream to be shared with multiple applications that are required to look over the same data in real-time.

“The key advantages that the Napatech Software Suite provides our OEM customers are flexibility and speed”, stated Henrik Brill Jensen, CEO, Napatech. “They only need to develop their application software once and then decide which Napatech network adapter combination works best in the particular deployment. They can also decide how many applications to combine in a single standard server platform. We have made the Napatech Software Suite API as clean and simple as possible, so that customers can get up and running with Napatech network adapters with a minimum of effort.”

Napatech supports a number of open-source software applications that can also help customers accelerate their development including OISF’s Suricata for IDS/IPS development, SNORT for IDS/IPS development, Ostinato for Traffic Generation, YAF for Flow Analysis, Wireshark for Network Analysis.