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
- The flow table capacity: 140 M bidirectional flows on NT200A02 (64-byte flow records, using the default 10.5 Gbytes in the onboard SDRAM), 90 M bidirectional flows on NT100A01 (64-byte flow records, using the default 7 Gbytes in the onboard SDRAM)
- 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.