Napatech and Spirent Giving Joint 40 GbE Vitualized Data Center Demo At Interop 2011

At a time when high speed data center environments have become critical to the success of the enterprises, Napatech and Spirent Communications (News - Alert) came together to host a live demo of one of the industry’s first data center virtualization environments supporting 40G Ethernet (GbE) server interfaces.

Napatech is the leading OEM supplier of multi-port 10 GbE and 1 GbE intelligent adapters for real-time network analysis. The company has so far deployed over 80,000 Ethernet ports.

Spirent Communications offers an extensive portfolio of solutions to test data centers, cloud computing environments, high speed Ethernet networks and services, 3G/4G wireless networks and devices, network security, and global navigation satellite systems.

In a press release, the two companies announced that the demonstration will be given jointly at booth number739 during Interop (News - Alert) Las Vegas from May 10 to May 12. At the demonstration, the companies are going to showcase the performance and scalability capabilities of virtualized data centers at 40G speeds.

With mass scale adoption of the cloud, more businesses are accessing applications on the cloud via mobile devices. This necessitates the expansion in the data center capacities, but without exorbitant cost. Virtualization and 40 GbE provide a cost effective and flexible option. However, the ability to test virtual environments at 40G is considered crucial to the deployment of new services. Spirent test modules will help the enterprises understand the performance and scale limitation of these high speed data center environments prior to service deployment.

In the release, the companies announced that the demonstration will feature Spirent TestCenter with HyperMetrics 40/100G test modules as well as Spirent TestCenter Virtual which validates the performance and scale of multiple virtual test machines established in virtual servers at 40 GbE line rate.

In virtual environments, multiple network appliance applications, including legacy and new applications can run side-by-side. At the live demo, Naptech will showcase how its recently launched Napatech (News - Alert) NT40E2-1 provide full 40 GbE packet capture of burst traffic, which can be distributed to the available virtual machines on a per port, protocol, flow or service basis based on Napatech’s VMware support.

The Napatech NT40E2-1 is claimed to be the first 40 GbE network adapter on the market with intelligent features that allow frame decoding, intelligent flow detection and distribution to up to 32 CPU cores. These features are designed to off-load and accelerate the performance of network appliances.

According to Napatech, virtualization support -- the latest capability in offer-- allows several monitoring applications running on virtual machines to share data captured at line rate by one or more Napatech network adapters.

Napatech leverages Spirent TestCenter Virtual to provide unsurpassed visibility into the entire data center infrastructure, accurately benchmarking and optimizing performance of virtual server switches and cloud-based virtualization.

Napatech launched the NT40E2-1 in early March. In a media release, the company claimed that in contrast to other network adapters in the market, Napatech’s focus was exclusively on the needs of network appliance vendors for full packet capture and transmission with zero packet loss.