Napatech Link-Capture™ Software
for Napatech FPGA-based SmartNICs

Product Brief

THE NECESSITY OF FULL PACKET CAPTURE
Today, a massive selection of tools is available to help engineers and administrators manage and secure their networks. Still, few capabilities are as fundamental to this task as packet capture.

Full packet capture provides an accurate, real-time view of what is happening within a network infrastructure. It provides organizations with the ability to recreate network events with high fidelity for verification and validation of architectural changes, measure network performance, troubleshoot issues, and perform forensic analysis to determine the impact of network breaches. However, as network speeds continue to increase, existing capture solutions are struggling to keep up.

LINK-CAPTURE™ SOFTWARE
In helping enterprises, network operators and equipment vendors overcome this challenge, Napatech has developed Link-Capture™ Software. This technology can immediately improve an organization’s ability to monitor and react to events that occur within its network infrastructure. The speed and accuracy of the software’s programmable logic enables:

• Line-Rate Capture and Replay
Link-Capture™ Software is ideal for performing high-speed packet capture with nanosecond time-stamping and replay with precise inter-frame gap control, which is critical when replaying captured traffic for troubleshooting or simulation of traffic flows.

• Stateful Flow Management
To maintain capture and analysis performance at high speeds, it is important to identify and direct traffic flows immediately upon ingress to minimize the load on user-space applications. Link-Capture™ Software provides the ability to dynamically identify and direct data flows into specific CPU cores based on the type of traffic being analyzed. Per flow match/action in HW gives control back to the user providing additional computation to the application by reducing the amount of data needed for processing as certain flows or protocols no longer need monitoring and can be blocked in hardware.

Napatech Link-Capture™ Software supports a broad range of applications and use cases. Where standard Network Interface Cards (NICs) suffer from intolerable packet loss for the target applications, Napatech guarantees line rate throughput with zero packet loss and replay for all packet sizes.

MULTIPLIED APPLICATION PERFORMANCE
Link-Capture™ Software has been benchmarked across a wide range of third-party, commercial and open source networking and cybersecurity applications. Common to these is the unconditional requirement for line rate throughput for all packet sizes, with 100% lossless packet forwarding and capture, for a multitude of sessions, users and flows.

With Link-Capture™ Software, the performance improvements are outstanding, delivering more than triple the performance over servers with standard NIC configurations. This means a third of the required server resources to run the same application.

KEY FEATURES

• Zero packet loss under all conditions
• Full throughput up to 100 Gbps bi-directional
• Nanosecond time-stamping and packet merge
• Up to 140 million flows with stateful match/action
• Flow records with metrics for both directions
• PCAP and DPDK API support

Note: Feature set varies depending on the SmartNIC model.