NASA Ames Selects cPacket for Monitoring and Troubleshooting

cPacket has announced that the Emergent Network Technology Testbed group at NASA Ames Research Center is utilizing it’s cTap “intelligent network taps” for wire-speed monitoring of NASA links up to 10 gigabits per second.

cPacket (News - Alert) specializes in chips and hardware-software subsystems for complete packet inspection with applications for monitoring, security, test, measurement, and lawful intercept. Its technology is based on unique algorithms and radical chip architecture implemented on a custom chip.

 

“HECC has a reputation as one of the most demanding computational and network environments in the world,” said Rony Kay, cPacket founder and CEO, in a statement. “We are delighted to play a role in NASA’s mission to better understand our world and our universe.”

 

The cTap is a small network appliance that occupies one slot in an equipment rack and utilizes cPacket’s unique complete packet inspection chip. This innovative product is helping the Emergent Network Technology Testbed group with real-time situational awareness of network behavior and traffic, and a wide variety of troubleshooting and analysis capabilities not previously available at these data rates.

 

It supports the agency’s High End Computing Capability (HECC) project, which includes Pleiades, the world’s third fastest supercomputer. Also, it can transparently be “dropped in” to any 10 gigabit fiber network segment to begin its fine-grained monitoring and management functions. It also features packet filtering, mirroring, forwarding, and timestamps through dedicated 10G and 1G Ethernet ports.

 

“Because of our tradition of delivering mission-critical applications that push all technical boundaries, we often rely heavily on network monitoring tools such as cTaps,” Dave Hartzell, CSC network engineer and member of the Emergent Network Technology Testbed group, said in a statement.

 

Hartzell said that the cPacket’s technology enables more effective network monitoring and analysis of their 10 gigabit WAN and LAN and also provides greater visibility into their network links, providing in-depth, real-time information regarding traffic and performance metrics.

 

Headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., cPacket was founded in 2003 and is privately held. Company takes credit for introducing “complete packet inspection”, a chip-based technology that is capable of inspecting every bit in every packet of high-speed network traffic – both header and data payload – and then selectively monitoring and controlling the traffic based upon these inspections.