[November 07, 2011]

cPacket Receives $1 Million Department of Energy SBIR Grant to Enable Secure 100 Gigabit Networks

cPacket (News - Alert) Networks today announced it has received an SBIR grant of $1 million from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The goal of the grant is to develop a 100 Gbps (gigabit per second) scalable Network Intrusion (News - Alert) Detection System. As data rates in and between data centers and government organizations increase, securing higher speed traffic with traditional technologies becomes virtually insurmountable. This potentially exposes government and commercial organizations to security problems and critical service disruptions.

Existing security products cannot cope with the increasing network speeds of today's and tomorrow's networks and leave major information assets exposed to malicious attacks. Their inherent performance limitations cause them to fail to prevent malicious attacks, because they can be overwhelmed by higher traffic rates and spikes. This implies that hostile activities could disrupt government and business operations - which leads to degrading productivity and financial damages. Addressing these performance challenges requires a new technological approach, and cPacket has created the enabling technology that can deliver efficient and scalable Intrusion Detection Systems at 100 Gbps and beyond.

cPacket is addressing this issue by using its unique technologies to develop a front-end load balancer that delivers full line rate 100 Gbps performance under any traffic conditions. The product, called the cFlow 100G performs coherent flow balancing at full line rate. This means it will keep up with the high speed network traffic by partitioning the workload based on sophisticated algorithms. The cFlow 100G will enable next-generation parallel Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) and other applications that require real time processing of high volume of traffic.

Initially the product will be targeted at customers at advanced labs in the government sector, such as Natinal Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, as well as educational and commercial advanced research environments. As 10 Gbps is fast becoming the de-facto standard at most commercial data centers, these advanced research institutions are transitioning to cutting-edge 100 Gbps network infrastructure. To enable this transition, they need to overcome the performance limitations of the existing security technology, which expose them to unproductive down time and destructive security incidents.

"Networks have become an integral part of the infrastructure of financial, educational, research, and government organizations," said Rony Kay, founder and CEO of cPacket. "Better, faster, more efficient, and cost effective approaches to network monitoring and security will improve operational productivity and business continuity. The general public will benefit through reduced-services-downtime and prevention of undesired disruptions."

cPacket is able to develop this high speed solution because of its unique architecture and algorithmic fabric on a chip, which deliver complete packet and flow inspection at full line rate with deterministic performance at any traffic conditions. This is in contrast to existing solutions, which cannot handle even 10 Gbps line rate and do not guarantee deterministic performance, which cPacket's architecture will allow.

This $1 million grant is Phase II of an SBIR project and was awarded after the successful completion of Phase I. Along with cPacket, the International Computer Science Institute and the National Energy Research Scientific Computer Center ("NERSC") are participating in the development and testing of the project.

"A critical requirement for deployment of the next-generation 100 Gbps network is the creation of an effective security monitoring system to keep up with this level of data transfer," said Brent Draney, the Networking and Security Group Lead for NERSC. "We have been working with cPacket on security issues for several years and look to build on that relationship to take our security infrastructure to the next level."

About cPacket

cPacket Networks is an emerging leader in chips and technologies that offers breakthrough, Pervasive Network Intelligence™ at a fraction of the complexity, power, or cost of preexisting approaches. Based upon its powerful "complete packet inspection" architecture, cPacket provides manufacturers of routers, switches and other network appliances a low-impact means to easily drop game-changing, wire-speed active network traffic analysis and response directly into their existing or planned designs - whether targeted at the service providers, the enterprise, or the small office. The exploding use of 10 Gbps networks and beyond to support a relentless growth in media-centric applications makes the availability of truly pervasive network intelligence timely and critical.

cPacket was founded in 2003 and is located in Mountain View, CA (News - Alert). For more information, visit www.cpacket.com.

Editors, note: All trademarks and registered trademarks are those of their respective companies.

Additional background information is available at www.roeder-johnson.com.

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