NetQuest Adds PCI-E Support with Aspen NIC

Aspen, NetQuest's newest Pinnicle network interface card adapter, comes with more ports than the company's current Tahoe NIC and support for the up-and-coming PCI-E network standard, which is expected to replace PCI-X in PCs, workstations and servers.

NetQuest is unveiling a new network interface card adapter designed to enhance the performance of high-speed monitoring platforms.

The Aspen NIC adapter, announced March 17 and part of NetQuest's Pinnicle family of WAN/LAN NICs, offers greater flexibility than the company's Tahoe NIC by offering four ports. The four ports can be configured in a way to provide monitoring access for two full-duplex SONET/SDH lines, four 1 Gigabit Ethernet lines, or a mix of line speeds and technologies on a single NIC.

The line speed support includes OC48/STM-16 in the ATM packet switching protocol, Packet over SONET/SDH, and TDM networks.

In addition, Aspen offers support for the PCI Express network standard-Tahoe supports only the older PCI-X-that system OEMs are beginning to adopt, said Jesse Price, vice president of sales and marketing at NetQuest.

"That migration is happening right now," Price said. "Dell in its next generation of workstations will stop supporting PCI-X."

Aspen also gives enterprises the ability to get rid of "ambient noise" in the network traffic to enable the monitoring applications to focus on what needs to be monitored, he said. For example, if a business is running a WAN and wants to read e-mail traffic, Aspen can find that e-mail traffic from among other traffic streams, such as VOIP (voice over IP) and rich media.

"We can pretty much tap that pipe and separate all that traffic so [the monitoring tool] can focus on [the e-mail traffic]," Price said.

For vendors in the security space that offer such products as intrusion detection systems, Aspen can be included in those solutions, he said.