Path to 10Gigabit monitoring

nPulse Network Systems announced PCAP Express 10G, its latest hardware-accelerated implementation of the popular PCAP API. The product extends the functionality of nPulse’s PCAP Express technology up to line-rate 10Gbps monitoring and packet capture.

By transparently applying the power of hardware-acceleration to packet capture, time-stamping, measurement, filtering and multi-CPU load-balancing, PCAP Express 10G enables easy scaling of libpcap-based applications such as Wireshark, tcpdump or Snort, to 10Gbps performance, with standard, cost-effective server hardware.

Working with its technology partner Napatech, nPulse demonstrated a 10Gbps packet capture sensor using tcpdump at last week’s Interop show in New York. Porting of the tcpdump application to PCAP Express, and configuration for 10Gbps performance on a standard server appliance, took less than 10 minutes of effort. No source code modification was required. With a simple recompile using the PCAP Express 10G library in lieu of the standard PCAP library, tcpdump was capturing traffic at full 10Gbps line rate. The technology is readily applicable to other PCAP-based applications in monitoring, capture and storage, and network security.

PCAP Express 10G is available for the Linux and FreeBSD operating systems.