What is Supported?

Stateful Flow Management

Platform
Napatech SmartNIC
Content Type
User Guide
Capture Software Version
Link™ Capture Software 12.6

Napatech stateful flow management supports a wide range of flow features and capabilities.

Supported speeds and volumes

  • NT200A02: 2 × 100 Gbit/s, 2 × 40 Gbit/s or 8 × 10 Gbit/s wire speed packet processing
  • NT100A01: 4 × 25/10 Gbit/s or 4 × 10/1 Gbit/s wire speed packet processing
  • 50 M bidirectional flows, with metrics/metadata per flow direction (64-byte flow records), totaling 100 M flow records
  • Between 85 M and 130 M lookups per second (LPS), depending on the level of metrics collection
  • Intelligent caching to ensure even higher lookup rates for ”hot” flows/elephant flows

Other supported features

  • Learning/configuration rate exceeds 1 M flows/s when done from 1 CPU core and reaches a maximum just above 3 M flows/s when done from multiple CPU cores.
  • Based on fast DMA access.
  • Support for up to 256 threads/processes performing lockless learning in parallel.
  • Full stateful operation, with flow record updates on a per-packet basis.
  • Flow termination based on TCP state, timeout or application.
  • Flow Info records can be generated and used for NetFlow/IPFIX generation.
  • Metrics collected for packet count, byte count, and TCP flags. Metrics collection can be enabled on a per-flow basis.
  • Zero packet loss. Packets that cannot be looked up by the SmartNIC can be handled by the application.
  • Fast Path forward latency is below 3.5 µs.

Software and API support

  • NTAPI support: Native API with fastest performance
  • Sample application provided showing flow learning, flow lookup, exception handling and flow termination handling.