Packet Merging
Accolade SmartNICs are most often used in security and network monitoring appliances that are fed network traffic from a passive optical TAP or SPAN port. In other words, traffic that is replicated from a live network link. Each live network link is bi-directional with send and receive traffic. Each direction of the link is fed into a separate network port on the SmartNIC. So, for a single bi-directional link, two SmartNIC ports are used: one for the receive direction and one for the send direction.
For the host application (e.g. security or network monitoring) there is little distinction between send and receive traffic; meaning the host must analyze both sides equally. To maintain the time sequence integrity of the network traffic, an Accolade SmartNIC merges together (in timestamp order) the packets that form both sides of the traffic flow. In this way, the application sees both sides of the traffic flow and can analyze as if it is seeing the traffic “conversation” as it happened.
To test drive an Accolade SmartNIC please contact us at inquire@accoladetechnology.com