nPulse Employs NapaTech 2 x 10 Gbps Solution for Affordable Capture and Replay
New HammerHead system provides a traffic-testing product at an SMB-level price.
nPulse Network Systems develops network sensors for the government, telecom and commercial markets. Its HammerHead rollout this week could represent a significant advance for the SMB IT space.
The new nPulse HammerHead 10 Gbps capture and replay system promises a traffic-testing product that provides full line-rate 10 Gbps packet capture, record-to-disk, and replay capabilities at a price point that’s accessible to smaller companies.
According to nPulse, a growing deployment of 10 Gigabit networks and a proliferation of sophisticated network devices designed to work at high speeds makes realistic traffic testing “more important than ever.”
“At 10 Gbps, even small errors or configuration issues can have major performance, security, and cost impacts,” the company contends.
In a press release, nPulse adds, “The ideal test 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.”
nPulse vice president of marketing Peter Shaw points out that capturing, recording, and generating 10 Gbps of traffic on a sustained basis can be a difficult technical challenge to SMBs. He adds, “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,” Shaw says, “we have solved this problem using off-the-shelf hardware components combined with Napatech’s adapter, dramatically reducing cost without sacrificing performance.”
Hammerhead employs Napatech’s NT20E 2 x 10 Gbps in-line adapter. It provides full line-rate 10 Gbps packet capture without packet loss and nanosecond-precision time-stamping.†
“Napatech technology ensures packet analysis functions are off-loaded into the adapter hardware, freeing up our host CPUs to focus on the storage, manipulation, and retrieval of multi-Terabyte traffic files,” Shaw says.
