November 10, 2009 – nPulse Network Systems developed the nPulse HammerHead 10 Gbps Capture and Replay system based on the Napatech NT20E 2x10-Gbps in-line adapter, the company reports. HammerHead provides full line-rate 10-Gbps packet capture, record-to-disk, and replay capabilities.
“With growing deployment of 10 Gigabit networks, and the proliferation of sophisticated network devices designed to work at these high speeds, realistic traffic testing is more important than ever,” nPulse said when announcing the HammerHead system. At 10 Gbps, even small errors or configuration issues can have major performance, security, and cost impacts. The ideal scenario is to capture and record live network traffic, and then to replay it into the devices or networks under test, in a controlled environment and at line rates, to validate operation and performance.”
Peter Shaw, vice president of marketing for nPulse, further explained, “Capturing, recording, and generating 10 Gigabits per second of traffic on a sustained basis are difficult technical challenges, and existing approaches have relied on proprietary hardware and software solutions. However, proprietary 10 Gbps solutions are very expensive, and out of reach for most enterprises. With HammerHead, we have solved this problem using off-the-shelf hardware components combined with Napatech’s adapter, dramatically reducing cost without sacrificing performance.”
nPulse employed Napatech’s PCI-Express-based NT20E network adapter to ensure accurate packet capture and replay performance in HammerHead.
“Napatech’s NT20E provides us with full line-rate 10 Gbps packet capture with zero packet loss and nanosecond-precision time-stamping, which are critical for our customers’ applications and we can do this using industry-standard, multi-core server platforms. Napatech technology ensures that these and other packet analysis functions are offloaded into the adapter hardware, freeing up our host CPUs to focus on the storage, manipulation, and retrieval of multi-terabyte traffic files,” Shaw added.
The Napatech NT20 2x10-Gbps in-line adapter is designed for accelerating network monitoring system performance through a combination of line-rate 20-Gbps packet capture in real time and a series of intelligent features designed to offload the server CPU. These include nanosecond-precision time-stamping, port merging, packet decoding, on-the-fly filtering, deduplication, and flow identification with intelligent distribution of flows up to up to 32 CPU cores.
On the Web: nPulse Networks, Napatech
