May 16, 2011

By Shamila Janakiraman

TMCnet Contributor

 

Napatech (News - Alert), a provider of 1GbE & 10GbE programmable network adapters for network analysis and application off-load, recently announced that it will be supporting the monitoring of Ethernet data on 10 Gbps OC OC192c SONET and VC-4-64 SDH connections.

According to company sources, this support will allow Napatech’s OEM vendor customers to provide the same features and performance for both SONET/SDH and Ethernet interfaces.

In a release Henrik Brill Jensen, CEO Napatech said, “While Ethernet and IP are now the de-facto foundation for data communication and services, a lot of existing non-Ethernet infrastructure is still used to transport Ethernet traffic.”

“SONET/SDH is a good example where Ethernet traffic is encapsulated and transported on existing SONET/SDH connections in some parts of the network and over Ethernet connections in other parts of the network. Monitoring Ethernet traffic at multiple points from source to destination therefore requires support for both Ethernet and SONET/SDH interface,” Jensen added.

Napatech’s SONET/SDH support allows 802.3ea encapsulated Ethernet data to be extracted, pre-processed and analyzed by existing network monitoring and analysis applications.

Also Napatech’s existing NT20E2 intelligent network adapter will offer support by providing two 10 Gbps ports and full 20 Gbps transfer of Ethernet data to the host application. This allows the NT20E2 to be configured with Ethernet interfaces or with SONET/SDH interfaces by using the same hardware and SFP+ transceivers.

Company sources added that this provides OEM vendors with high flexibility under deployment besides ensuring that the same feature set, statistics and performance are offered for both deployment modes.

Recently Napatech was in the news for demonstrating a new VMware-based data distribution solution for virtual network appliances at Interop (News - Alert) Las Vegas.

This virtualization solution will enable multiple network appliances to be consolidated on a single server platform. Also it does not require any changes to be made to the application or the operating system.

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Shamila Janakiraman is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Shamila’s articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Carrie Schmelkin