NetApp and nPulse Partner

As large government agencies and commercial organizations deploy
ever-faster networks, one of the challenges they face is enabling
their network and security monitoring infrastructure to keep up with the
network itself.

A key component of any monitoring infrastructure is full packet
capture and storage, which enables the enterprise to go back in time, examine
network performance or security incidents, and answer the question, ‘What
happened?‘

NetApp, Inc. and nPulse
Technologies, Inc., in flow
and packet capture, have teamed to offer a packet capture solution that is
setting records for speed of capture and scalability of storage.

Capturing data packets at the highest rates of speed without dropping any of
the packets is essential to maintaining security across large, fast
networks. Many enterprises are stuck with monitoring solutions that are
‘1-gigabit monitoring solutions in a 10-gigabit world.’ Legacy packet
capture solutions with high rates of packet loss undermine the effectiveness of powerful cyber-security analysis tools, producing instead the cyber
equivalent of a corrupted database. Cyber warriors require ‘all the
packets, all the flows, all the time.’

nPulse’s Hammerhead
Capture appliance captures data at the highest rates of speed without data
packet loss. A powerful storage capability is a key component for large
organizations, allowing both network and cyber-security managers to know what’s
going through the data gateways, recording that flow of information, and
enabling them to reconstruct everything taking place inside the network – key
components of the security needs of any agency or enterprise. With the combined solution, government and commercial enterprises can have confidence
that they can recognize and respond to any attack on their networks with
certainty.

The solution addresses both the bandwidth and
content challenges facing large enterprises that need to keep their networks
protected while handling vast amounts of data in real time. nPulse partnered
with NetApp to exploit the NetApp E-Series storage system after a customer
asked nPulse for a solution because other systems could not handle the required
storage capacity and data sharing needs. The E-Series is a storage
system designed to meet wide-ranging requirements, including support for performance
file systems, bandwidth-intensive streaming applications, and
transaction-intensive workloads.

In its initial set of tests of the Hammerhead
and E-Series systems, the nPulse and NetApp team achieved a number of firsts,
including:

• Encrypting the packet and
  flow data as it is being stored at a rate of 24 gigabits per second
• Capturing multiple
  24-gigabit data streams to a shared performance file system
• Making that data available
  for analytics in the open standard ‘pcap’ format with the performance required for exploiting the data.

"For companies and
government agencies, this open and high-speed capability enables their big data
systems to securely access large volumes of packet data," said Timothy
Sullivan, CEO of nPulse. "It
captures all the packets on the fastest networks and presents them in standard
pcap format to the sophisticated analytics required to stop exploits in their
tracks."

Mark Weber, president of NetApp’s U.S. Public Sector, also announced
the launch of its U.S. Public Sector Cyber Alliance Program. It is a collaborative program designed to establish partnerships
and interoperability of cyber solutions based on NetApp storage,
virtualization, and big data technologies. The main goal of the program is to
develop capabilities that enable organizations to better respond to and address
the cyber threats they face.

"Our storage lies at the
heart of many large virtual environments, and we are proud to add the ability
to defend them from cyber attack or misuse," said Weber. "We are also pleased to have nPulse as our
Cyber Alliance Program inaugural member."