Concentrate on Developing Value Added OEM Security / Network Monitoring Software

OEM customers and systems integrators require end to end visibility within their Security/ Network monitoring appliance offerings. Applications enabling access to real-time and historical network traffic, detection of emerging cyber threats and anomalies, forensic analysis, and advanced intrusion prevention require a suite of acceleration features including lossless packet capture, flow classification, deduplication, precise time stamping, packet filtering, and more, that are costly to develop or may create an opportunity cost.

An FPGA-based,  hardware application acceleration solution provides OEM’s with benefits in terms of reducing development costs and accelerating time-to-market. Two major software integration points make that possible, 1) a scalable API and 2) a customizable device driver.

Accolade Technology provides global OEM customers, distributors and systems integrators with the most advanced 1-100GE FPGA-based application acceleration adapters on the market. We call these ANIC adapters.

ANIC API (Application Programming Interface)

The security or networking application that runs in user space on the network appliance has to be modified in order to interact with the FPGA adapter. To keep the modification simple, Accolade provides a lightweight, C language API which is linked to the user application as a shared library. Various API calls are used to communicate with the ANIC adapter.

One of the many benefits of a standard API is investment protection. With a common API customers can seamlessly migrate their network appliance from one ANIC adapter (e.g. 10G) to another (e.g. 100G) without any significant modification to the host application.

ANIC Device Driver

A device driver (supplied by Accolade) must be loaded into the network appliance as an extension to the host kernel. Device drivers are available for Linux, Windows and FreeBSD. As with conventional device drivers the ANIC driver facilitates communication to the ANIC adapter (via the host kernel) for common operations such as adapter setup, turning ports on and off or reading port status. However, unlike conventional device drivers the ANIC driver also facilities a “fast path” or kernel bypass mode which is used for most data intensive interactions with the ANIC adapter such as table updates or bulk data transfer.