In a recent blog post, I discussed how Suricata is CPU bound and one way to overcome this limitation is to add an FPGA-based SmartNIC to offload the host CPU. This begs the obvious question: How do I integrate the SmartNIC and how difficult is it to do? For Accolade SmartNICs the answer is simple; we have done the heavy lifting for you so that integration is seamless. Suricata supports native integration with all Accolade adapters. Without this integration, Suricata application users would have to modify the application themselves to directly access Accolade APIs. While this is totally doable, it adds a layer of extra work that many users are not willing to undertake. With this offering Accolade has made integration of Suricata and ANIC adapters seamless.

With this seamless integration the Suricata application can take advantage of all Accolade host CPU offload functions such as flow classification and flow shunting. This in turn opens up new possibilities such as having Accolade shunt away flows (e.g. streaming media traffic such as YouTube) that Suricata does not need to process. CPU cycles are then saved to be used for more important and valuable Suricata capabilities.

To test drive an Accolade ANIC adapter with your implementation of Suricata please contact us at [email protected]