Date: 07/01/2012

Data packet inspection solution from Cavium and Sensory handles 100Gbps speed

Sensory Networks has extended its partnership with Cavium to bring to market a security inspection system to inspect communication data packets at over 100Gbps speed. Optimized version of Sensory’s HyperScan pattern matching software runs on a production version of Cavium’s single chip 32-core OCTEON II CN6880.

“Today, security is necessary at all network levels, whether it’s in the cloud, enterprise, wireless infrastructure or at home,” said Jeff Wilson, Principal Security Analyst, Infonetics Research. “The availability of Sensory’s software scaling Cavium’s broad OCTEON processor family is great news for equipment suppliers.”

"Cavium's flagship 32-core OCTEON II 68xx has delivered excellent performance in all our benchmarks," said Geoff Langdale, CTO for Sensory Networks. "We are particularly impressed at how linearly the performance scales on a per core basis. Cavium’s strong multiprocessor support and providing real cores versus pseudo cores makes Security Inspection performance highly predictable on the OCTEON architecture, even for emerging products.”

“Not only does this benchmark set a new industry standard for Security Inspection performance on our OCTEON II, we are delivering this at significantly lower power and lower cost compared to our competition,” said YJ Kim, General Manager of Cavium’s Infrastructure Products Group. “Sensory Networks HyperScan and Chimera software, coupled with our built-in hardware DPI engines on our OCTEON family, truly bring a very rich set of inspection capabilities at extremely high levels of performance to the market. And with the advent of the OCTEON III family, that increases both the core count and frequency, we expect the performance of this combined Security Inspection Solution to scale over 250Gbps per chip. In a four-chip configuration, connected via Cavium’s revolutionary, low latency coherency architecture, we expect it will be possible to deliver over a Terabit per second of full security scanning performance.”

Cavium suggests using a combination of OCTEON optimized versions of Sensory Networks HyperScan or Chimera software libraries and OCTEON II’s in-built hardware Hyper Finite Automata (HFA) DPI Engines, OEMs will now be able to add more layers of deep packet inspection, more simultaneous scanning applications, and support many more rules sets and inspection hierarchies across the whole of the OCTEON family, scaling from single-core, low-end devices up to 48-core high performance platforms.

Sensory Networks software now also supports Cavium’s TurboDPI Platform framework.