본사가 덴마크에 있으며, 2003년 시작한 회사입니다. FPGA 기반의 제품을 전세계에 15년 동안 공급하고 있으며, 일반 표준 서버에서 연산 집약적인 애플리케이션을 가속화하는 하이테크 솔루션을 기반 기술로 하는 회사입니다. 2013년 노르웨이 오슬로 증권거래소(NAPA.OL)에 상장된 회사입니다.
네트워크 성능 모니터링, 테스트 및 측정, 보안 및 최적화된 제품으로 금융 서비스, 통신, 클라우드 및 데이터 센터 서비스, 전자 상거래 및 미디어, 인프라 및 방위, 기업 관리 및 보안과 같은 다양한 산업에서 사용되고 있습니다. 최근에는 가상화(Virtualization)에 특화된 제품들도 출시하기 시작하였습니다.
네트워크 가속기의 Napatech 제품 포트폴리오는 1,2 또는 4 포트를 통해서 1Gbps~100Gbps/s 속도를 지원합니다. 첫 번째 제품은 2003 년 12 월에 출시 된 가속기로, 10Gbps 네트워크 속도를 지원합니다. 2014 년 1 분기까지 약 40 가지 이상의 다양한 가속기 모델을 생산했습니다. 가장 중요한 기능은 패킷 손실이없는 상태로 모든 네트워크 데이터를 캡처하고 데이터를 전송하는 것입니다.
Napatech의 차별성
Napatech은 FPGA에 대한 Hardware 기술 뿐만 아니라 Hardware와 독립된 XILINX/INTEL에 적합한 FPGA Configuration Software라는 새로운 제품 또한 가지고 있습니다.
빠른 변화와 그에 대한 대처가 필요한 시점에서 FPGA Solution은 성장에 필요한 문제들을 해결해 줄 것입니다. 그에 Napatech에서 제공하고 FPGA Hardware와 Software는 이 시장에 가장 적합한 하나의 Solution이 될 것 입니다
사진=Napatech 제공
FPGA SmartNIC 시장은 2025년까지 1.4B 달러로 빠르게 증가될 것이고 Offload NIC 시장에서도 추가로 $ 1.7B의 시장을 형성할 것이라고 합니다. 이미 검증된 FPGA 기반의 제품과 기술을 가지고 있으며 높은 시장 진입 장벽을 가진 이 시장에서 우위를 유지한다는 것을 보면 제품에 대한 현재와 미래에 대한 리더십을 가진 회사라고 볼 수 있을거 같습니다. 기본 자사 제품에 추가로 3rd Party인 Xilinx/Intel에 대한 solution을 추가한 점은 더 많은 고객 확보에 좋은점이 아닐까 생각합니다.
4x TRex Performance Increase for Tx & Rx Napatech Link™ Capture Software for Intel® PAC with Intel Arria® 10 GX FPGA
Testing and validating network performance is of the utmost importance to network equipment manufacturers, operators and owners. In the past, the traditional approach to testing network performance was based on proprietary traffic generators. But while such solutions have indeed proved efficient for a long series of use cases, they either fall short or prove massively cost prohibitive when it comes to complex and realistic traffic generation.
To manage the cumulating density of functionalities and workloads, the industry now demands a testing regime that not only delivers outstanding performance – but also offers better scalability and drastic cost improvements.
TRex
TRex is an open source traffic generator developed specifically to address these shortcomings through an innovative and extendable software implementation. What differentiates TRex is its portability, cost, capacity and flexibility.
As for any other traffic generation solution, the ability for TRex to reliably generate packets at line rate across all packet sizes is paramount. Whether simply packet blasting or replaying PCAP files for testing, the ability to send traffic for small packets at the maximum speed is a prerequisite.
Traffic reception is also of critical importance. The ability to receive the generated traffic once it has traversed the Device Under Test (DUT) is the only way of measuring the effectiveness of the solution. If the traffic reception does not match the generation capabilities, testing is compromised as one cannot identify if it is the DUT that is dropping traffic or the test equipment itself.
Accelerated
TRex performance In addressing this challenge, Napatech has created a hardware acceleration solution that greatly increases TRex performance. This has been achieved by making the Napatech Link™ Capture Software available as an Acceleration Stack for the Intel® Programmable Acceleration Card (PAC) with Intel Arria® 10 GX FPGA.
Optimized for lossless transmit and receive, the solution demonstrates substantial performance advantages for TRex compared to a standard Network Interface Card (NIC): • 2x traffic generation performance • 4x traffic reception performance
Turning acceleration into value
These performance advantages ultimately allow you to: • Maximize your server performance by improving CPU utilization • Minimize your TCO by reducing number of servers, thus optimizing rack space, power, cooling and operational expenses • Diminish your time-to-resolution, thereby enabling greatly increased efficiency
TRex generates layer 4-7 traffic based on pre-processing and smart replay of real traffic templates. TRex amplifies both client and server-side traffic. When running on the Intel PAC with Napatech Link™ Capture Software, TRex can both generate and receive traffic at 40G line rate regardless of packet size. This enables scalability both of bandwidth and feature complexities, thus providing businesses a highperformance and massively cost-efficient alternative to proprietary traffic generators.
TRex Stateless functionality includes support for multiple streams, the ability to change any packet field and provides per stream statistics, latency and jitter. Advanced Stateful functionality includes support for emulating L7 traffic with fully-featured scalable TCP layer.
Test configuration
The outstanding improvements achieved with this solution were demonstrated by comparing TRex performance running on a Dell PowerEdge R740 with a standard 40G NIC card and the Intel PAC. Test configuration: dual-socket Dell R740 with Intel® Xeon® Gold 6138 2.0 GHz, 128GB RAM running CentOS 7.5.
Key solution features
• Line rate network throughput for all packet sizes • Lossless capture for perfect inspection and detection • Onboard packet buffering during micro-burst or PCI Express bus congestion scenarios • Advanced host memory buffer management for ultra-high CPU cache performance • Packet classification, match/action filtering and zero-copy forwarding • Intelligent and flexible load distribution to as many as 64 queues improving CPU cache performance by always delivering the same flows to the same cores
Napatech Link™ Capture Software for Intel® PAC
The Intel® Programmable Acceleration Card (PAC) with Intel Arria® 10 GX FPGA is a PCIe-based FPGA accelerator card for data centers supporting both inline and lookaside acceleration.
As the leader in FPGA-based SmartNIC software and hardware, Napatech has made its Link™ Capture Software available as an Acceleration Stack for the Intel PAC.
Napatech’s Reconfigurable Computing Platform flexibly offloads, accelerates and secures open, standard, high-volume and low-cost server platforms allowing them to meet the performance requirements for networking, communications and cybersecurity applications.
TRex
TRex is an ideal example of the type of critical enterprise security application that can achieve better performance through hardware acceleration with the Intel PAC and Napatech dataplane software.
TRex is an open source, low cost, stateful and stateless traffic generator. Typical use cases include:
• Creating high scale benchmarks for stateful networking gear, e.g. firewalls, DPI, IPS and load balancers • Simulating high scale DDOS attacks • Performing high scale, flexible testing for switches • Performing scale tests for huge numbers of clients/ servers for controller-based testing • Performing EDVT and production tests
TRex can be compiled with native support for hardware acceleration based on the Intel hardware and Napatech software. Instructions specific to building TRex with support for Napatech are listed in the Installation Quick Guide available at the Napatech Documentation Portal.
