'packet engine' discussion.

[Russell Fulton]

Hi Chris,
	My collegue Nevil Brownlee (author of Netramet and now half 
time at CAIDA, but is sometimes resident in the offic next door ;-) 
also has links with the WAND group at University of Waikato (about 100 
miles south of Auckland).  The WAND group have been building special 
ATM cards for monitoring network traffic (they are currently working on 
OC48 and I think I have gigabit ethernet card on the go as well.  These 
cards are designed for monitoring with lots of smarts (and a GPS 
synched clock on the card to extract headers and provide very accurate 
time stamps.  The card are expensive (several thousand dollars each) 
but at the moment they are only getting a few made.  If there was a 
demand for them then prices could come down substantially.

I know they are also looking at inovative 'PC' architecture for their 
next generation card which will overun any conventional machine.

Nevil is in the US at the moment but will be coming back after IETF so 
I can get some more details then.

In the meantime here is their url http://wand.cs.waikato.ac.nz/

Russell Fulton, Computer and Network Security Officer
The University of Auckland,  New Zealand