Napatech's main product line is a collection of network adapter cards served in both PCI-X and PCIe form factors. Offered purely to OEMs, the key feature of the cards are their hardware accelerated capabilities especially for use in traffic capturing applications (i.e., security appliances, performance monitoring, traffic capture, etc.), but the cards are additionally able to transmit traffic, as well; either traffic generated directly by the local host, or traffic that is retransmitted from received packets (either locally by the card itself--the packet is immediately returned to the same or a different port by the card without requiring host resources--or after modification of the packet by the host, with MAC CRCs automatically recalculated by the card or ignored as per the customer's needs).

As mentioned, the key feature of the cards are their hardware accelerated capabilities, which combine to enable the cards to process traffic at full line rates with, according to the vendor, no packet loss and less than 2% of CPU overhead (less than 1% in the high-end cards). In all the available cards, some form of programmable load balancing can be employed in which traffic is routed to a specific server buffer (and therefore a specific CPU core for multi-core infrastructures). In the low-end cards, this load balancing is performed on a per-port basis (each port has its own server buffer); while the higher end-cards add programmable hardware filters (up to 64), automated frame decoding (with the ability to automatically recognize pre-defined protocols, among other capabilities), and flow recognition (enabled by the hardware generation of hash keys based on sender/receiver IP addresses or IP addresses and transmit/receive ports). Information detected/generated by the cards is additionally made available to host applications (removing the need for host apps to parse/generate the information themselves) via the addition of standard PCAP descriptors, the vendor's own Napatech Descriptors (which use the 4 unused bytes of the PCAP descriptor to add info), or Extended Descriptors, as needed by the customer.

Other card features include:

- Automated hardware time stamping of packets, with synchronization to the local clock or to an optional, external unit that itself can synchronize via GPS

- The ability to merge multiple traffic channels (across separate ports) into a single string to be fed to the host

- The ability to slice data out of frames before transmission to the host; either on a fixed (all frames truncated to n bytes, for example) or dynamic basis, depending on card model

- The ability to de-duplicate packets before transmission to the host. This capability, along with the slicing and programmable hardware filtering features, enable the cards to potentially be able to handle line rate traffic even though the combined speeds of the physical ports may exceed the bus speed of the card (since traffic can be reduced overall before being passed on to the host)

Three primary families of cards are now available from the vendor. On the low end, the XD card is a 2 x 1 Gb/sec PCI-X card with support for copper or optical ports and no filtering or frame classification capabilities. Next in line are the XL2 PCI-X cards, with four ports (all copper, all optical, or two of each) and including hardware filters and frame classification, but no de-duplication support. finally, the top of the line is the NT family of cards, PCIe cards with port outlays similar to the XL2s and bearing the full feature set, including de-duplication and support for traffic balancing (by port, traffic type, or flow) across up to 32 CPU cores. The NT family also includes an 8-port expansion adapter, as well as dual 10 Gig cards in PCI-X and PCIe flavors.

Note that not all features described above may be available in all card configurations; visit the vendor's site for complete details.

New to the vendor's product line is the NTNPU20E (the NPU card), also dubbed the "Pattern Matching Adapter" for its pattern matching features, including support for up to 1 million match patterns with a combined total of up to 2 million characters; support for case-sensitive/-insensitive paterns, binary patterns, and patterns containing wild cards; and support for matching patterns across fragmented and non-fragmented packets. (The 64 programmable hardware filters available in the other NT/XLT cards support the matching of patterns consisting of up to 64 bytes at a fixed location in the payload.) Based on the Tilera 64 multicore processor, the NTNPU20E is a PCIe card including dual 10 Gb/sec ports and can be used as a stand alone card or in combination with the other cards.

Visit the Napatech Web site for further information.

product submission by EITPlanet Staff

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