Aspen, NetQuests newest Pinnicle network interface card adapter, comes with more ports than the companys 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 NetQuests Pinnicle
family of WAN/LAN NICs, offers greater
flexibility than the companys 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 standardTahoe
supports only the older PCI-Xthat 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.
Enterprise Networking 
