14 DAY TRIAL // Randy Caldejon, President with nPulse Networks - developer and integrator of advanced packet capture solutions for commercial and Government customers, also leader in hardware, acceleration of open-source based solutions for network security, monitoring and data management - has recently announced the availability of a new Linux distro, named Catapulta. nPulse Networks company is headquartered in the USA in Reston, VA and it also deals with the maintenance of a research and development facility in Charlottesville, Virginia.
nPulse Networks officials have also stated they've been working on a project which aimed at building a line-rate, gigabit packet capture appliance from industry-standard, commodity server components for less than US$4,000. This kind of low-cost platform will be designed to deal with a high level of performance in intercepting and monitoring products. For this special platform, nPulse has created its own custom Linux distro, named "Catapulta".
"For our security, monitoring and intercept customers, 100% visibility of network traffic is critical, but we discovered that none of the current Linux distributions is specifically tuned for packet capture. To reach our goal, we had to build Catapulta. Now we plan to make it available for others to use and extend", stated Caldejon.
Peter Shaw, VP of Marketing with nPulse Networkings added:
"In fact, we were able to achieve 2Gbps of throughput within our design parameters, with a total CPU utilization of less than 4%. Adding Streamline allowed us to achieve line-rate deep packet inspection, comparing over 2000 case-insensitive regular expressions while using less than half of the CPU resource. And we can demonstrate that Catapulta will scale to 10Gbps and beyond."
Catapulta integrates some open-source tools such as PF_Ring or Streamline. The company will also offer full support at www.catapulta.org and also provides a forum for developers interested in working for enhancing the distribution. The new distribution is said to be available for download and use in the last quarter of 2007.