Government Agencies Can Rely on Better Network Security as nPulse Technologies and NetApp Achieve Record Full Packet Capture Performance

SUNNYVALE, CA--(Marketwire - Aug 22, 2012) -  As large government agencies and commercial organizations deploy ever-faster networks, one of the greatest 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 (NASDAQ: NTAP) and nPulse Technologies, the industry leader in high-performance flow and packet capture, have teamed to offer a packet capture solution that is setting new 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, ultrafast networks. Many enterprises today 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 today's powerful cyber-security analysis tools, producing instead the cyber equivalent of a corrupted database. Cyber warriors today require "all the packets, all the flows, all the time."

That's where nPulse Technologies comes in. 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 nPulse and NetApp^® solution, government and commercial enterprises can have confidence that they can recognize and respond to any attack on their networks with certainty.

The nPulse and NetApp 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 high-performance storage system designed to meet wide-ranging requirements, including support for high-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 high-performance file system
• Making that data available for analytics in the open standard "pcap" format with the high 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 Technologies. "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. NetApp's Cyber Alliance Program 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."

Additional Resources

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