Mellanox Enables Stateful Packet Processing at 400Gb/s

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. announced the availability of Deep Packet Inspection and Stateful Packet Processing software libraries showing performance on its NPS-400 Network Processor.

These software libraries, coupled with the hardware acceleration capabilities of the NPS-400, enable Deep Packet Inspection processing for application recognition at record processing rates of up to 400Gb/s, in conjunction with handling of 100 million flows with an average packet size of 400B. These processing capabilities enable customers to build Intrusion Detection Systems and Intrusion Prevention Systems and to accelerate processing capabilities for switch routers.

The Stateful Packet Processing and the Deep Packet Inspection libraries enable developers to delelop deeper into the network packets for better understanding of the network flows. This brings to IT managers the ability to enhance security and prevent malicious access to their data centers.

It also allows cost-effective load balancing, network monitoring or any other appliances based on network flow recognition.

“The NPS-400 Network Processor enables data centers managers to leverage the performance breakthrough in network processing to build the most cost effective and enhanced network flow recognition appliances,” said Dror Goldenberg, VP, software architecture, Mellanox. “In particular, security has become a critical factor in today’s data center, and with NPS-400 IT managers can dramatically enhance their intrusion detection and prevention capabilities for example. We are working with multiple partners to deliver those solutions to the market.“

“Qosmos is very excited to collaborate with Mellanox providing a record breaking performance of Stateful Packet Processing and Deep Packet Inspection at 400Gb/s on the Mellanox NPS-400 solution,” said Thibaut Bechetoille, CEO, Qosmos Tech S.A.S. “Deep Packet Inspection drives L7 applications intelligence in the network and we expect further deployment of L7 services at more and more places in the network.”

“Mellanox’s flow processing and Deep Packet Inspection benchmarks show the NPS-400 delivers on its promise of unprecedented Layer 4-7 performance,” said Bob Wheeler, principal analyst, The Linley Group. “The highly programmable NPS-400 enables a new breed of white-box appliance suitable for the most demanding SDN and NFV applications.“

These software libraries are available as part of the NPS-400 software development kit and can be obtained in source code format as part of standard licensing and support agreements. These libraries are compatible with the SDK released through OpenNPU in open source.

NPS is a company’s family of high-end network processors capable of packet processing functions and is programmable in C in the Linux environment. It is capable of performing L2-7 packet processing and is well-tuned for router-type functions as well as more functions like Deep packet processing for IPS/IDS or application recognition, firewalling or DDOS functions.