Napatech (News - Alert), a vendor of intelligent adapters for network monitoring and analysis, recently announced that original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in the future might need to redesign their performance monitoring appliances due to increasing use of Internet-based services. The company announced it is capable of handling the demands from the vendors with its portfolio of products.

The adapters from Napatech allow vendors to design high-performance appliances using standard off-the-shelf server hardware. The company boasts of lineup of intelligent network analysis adapters for 40 Gbps, 10 Gbps and 1 Gbps networks. The Napatech adapters can be run on Linux, FreeBSD or Windows. These adapters are presently serving over 100 OEM vendor customers.

"Performance monitoring is becoming more complex, so it stands to reason that performance monitoring appliance designs need to become more sophisticated," stated Henrik Brill Jensen (News - Alert), CEO, Napatech. "We have seen a transition from network performance monitoring to application performance monitoring requiring appliances to become more application aware. In particular, more Internet application aware, as there are a multitude of critical services now being transported over HTTP. This is not just social media, but includes demanding services such as voice-over-IP and streaming videoconferencing, which are valuable services for businesses.”

Napatech helps OEM network appliance vendors to build cost-effective solutions based on high-speed network adapters designed for standard servers and optimized for very low CPU load. The 40 Gbps intelligent network adapters for real-time network analysis both are ideal for Packet Capture & Replay applications and in-line "bump-in-the-wire" applications. On the other hand, the NT20E2 Capture Adapter was the first packet capture adapter on the market to include transmitting capabilities allowing support of Capture/Replay and Traffic Generation applications. This capability has now been extended to 40 Gbps with the NT40E2-1 Capture Adapter and to the 4x10 GbE NT40E2-4 Adapter.

“The latest server chips provide tremendous processing power and fast memory access,” continued Jensen.

“The key for appliance vendors is understanding how to harness this power to provide high-performance, scalable appliances that are application aware at a range of speeds. At the network layers, from layer 1 to layer 4, it is possible to deterministically identify well-known services at line-speed even up to 40 Gbps,” explained Jensen. “Identifying layer 7 applications running over HTTP requires more processing power and memory, which is available in abundance in the server. It therefore makes sense to use this power to identify layer 7 applications in software. There are several vendors of Deep Packet Inspection software that can help appliance vendors develop this capability and recent demonstrations have shown that 20 Gbps throughput is achievable using this approach.”