The nPulse Sensor product line includes network gear focused on the capture and monitoring of network traffic. The vendor offers products targeted to OEMs looking to build traffic monitoring appliances, developers looking for a hardware platform on which to create monitoring and/or security-related applications, and end-organizations looking for appliances that can capture network traffic for analysis systems.

Technology building blocks common to each of the nPulse products include the Packet Capture Express NICs, and the Catapulta O/S.

The Packet Capture Express (PCAPx) NICs provide the hardware-based capture features of the sensors, and are offered in PCI-X or PCIe form factors depending on model. (The hardware is based on Napatech NICs, with drivers and tools provided by nPulse.) Available in Gigabit (2 or 4 capture ports, in SFP or 10/100/1000 RJ-45 flavors) and now 10 Gig (2 XFP ports) versions, the PCAPx cards boast an algorithmic balance between their FPGA-based acceleration modules and multi-core CPUs, providing--according to the vendor--support for throughput rates of up to 1.5 million 64-byte packets per gigabit port. The cards are based on the PCAP API and therefore can be used by PCAP-based applications without requiring changes to the source code (though a recompile using the vendor's PCAP library may be necessary). The vendor states that the cards provide CPU offload for packet processing, including protocol decodes and hashing, while consuming less than 2% of the CPU's utilization.

The second key component of the vendor's sensor appliances is the open source, Ubuntu-based Catapulta operating system (development of which is funded by the vendor). nPulse describes this OS as specifically tuned for network monitoring and packet capture usages, including such kernel modifications as Luca Deri's PF_RING and Dr. Herbert Bos's Streamline.

Four primary products are offered by the vendor; each of which load Catapulta on rack-mountable machines themselves loaded with some combination of PCAPx cards. The Catapult G-Series sensors are described by the vendor as "multi-purpose" sensors, including 2 or 4 capture ports and driven by a dual-core Intel Xeon 1.8 GHz processor and 1 GB of RAM. The nPulse IDS sensor is a Snort-based appliance in 2 and 4 Gb/sec models. The NetFlow Sensor, based on Luca Deri's nProbe and targeted specifically to NetFlow-based analysis, is an IPFIX-compliant sensor in single and dual-port models. And finally, the Shadow C4 Traffic Recorder is a 3U packet capture appliance with 4 ports, 4 CPU cores, and 16 drives in a RAID 5 configuration.

The nPulse sensors are available now, with pricing starting at $4,999.

Visit the nPulse Web site for further information.

product submission by EITPlanet Staff

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