ANDOVER, Mass. /Massachusetts Newswire/ — Napatech today announces support for Fiber Channel over Ethernet also known as FCoE for the NT family of 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps high-performance network adapters. The new Napatech FCoE implementation is an integral part of later releases and is now in the field. By merging IP and Fiber Channel traffic over the same Ethernet, large server farms can reduce the number of adapters and cabling to half in the best case. The Napatech NT family of programmable adapters can now be used for monitoring this combined traffic.
The Napatech adapters support the FCoE standard by being able to filter, time-stamp and capture FCoE frames at line speed without packet loss. The main features and benefits of combining a Napatech Programmable Ethernet Adapter with FCoE support are:
* Very accurate time stamp resolution of 10 nanoseconds, in six different formats
* Very low CPU utilization, below 1 percent
* Utilization of many of the advanced Napatech Network Adapter features
* Distribution of network frames to 1-32 host CPU cores
* Use of up to 64 advanced adapter hardware filters
“The new support for FCoE allows our OEM customers with network monitoring solutions to enter large datacenters or server farms that have implemented combined IP and Fiber Channel traffic. By having the same comprehensive API with the many filtering capabilities as our current Programmable Ethernet Adapters, this greatly expands the reach of these solutions,” says Nick Arraje, VP of Sales, North America.
The main driver for combining the two types of traffic onto one Ethernet is cost. Standard switches and routers can be used in the Datacenter infrastructure; and with the new Napatech support for FCoE, the need for two monitoring devices or two Data Capture devices is eliminated.
The new features described above are added to the already feature-rich product line offered to Napatech’s OEM customers. The high-performance adapters already include line rate capture and processing of frames up to 20 Gbps, 10 ns time-stamping, channel merging, frame classification, conditional dynamic frame slicing, 64 user-programmable filters, packet coloring, deduplication, support for 32 CPU cores, and more. The feature set supports Linux, FreeBSD and Windows, and includes a programming interface and development tools.
About Napatech
Napatech is a leading OEM supplier of multi-port 1GbE and multi-port 10GbE high-performance network adapters. The core idea is to off-load real-time/streaming protocol, payload analysis and control applications traditionally implemented in software or proprietary hardware. Napatech expects a huge growth in the demand for high-performance adapters as Ethernet speeds increase. Napatech has sales, marketing and R&D offices in Mountain View, California, Andover, Massachusetts, and Copenhagen, Denmark.
