Due to the exponential growth of data traffic, service operators need increased levels of switching and fast
forwarding bandwidth to keep up with rapidly growing operational demands. ADLINK has developed its
own network traffic management software, PacketManager, to allow customers to configure, manage and
monitor ADLINK switch and processor blades.
Designed to support different hardware architectures, including x86, Cavium, Broadcom and IntelR Red
Rock Canyon, ADLINK PacketManager provides a hardware abstraction layer (HAL), to make transparent
the differences in hardware between platforms. In addition to HAL, ADLINK PacketManager also includes
a variety of L2/L3 protocols, as well as flow handling routines that allow customers to develop their own
applications for both data and control planes with less effort.
Control Plane Software
Built using the Linux operating system as a foundation, the ADLINK PacketManager control plane includes
the most commonly used Layer2/3 protocols and API features, including VLAN, LAG, IGMP, STP, RIP,
OSPF, BGP, ISIS, ACL and QoS. The control plane also takes ownership of updating the protocol state/
information, including port state/statistics, ARP/routing tables, and relative protocols states, and then
synchronizes the data with the data plane.
For easy deployment and management, ADLINK PacketManager not only provides a friendly command
line interface (CLI), but also includes remote procedure call (RPC) based APIs to allow further customization
and integration with the customers? management systems.
Data Plane Software
In contrast to the control plane, the ADLINK PacketManager data plane provides a fast
path to process packets using pre-defined routines, without extra protocol interaction.
Generally, with the exception of protocol packets which are sent to the control
plane for further processing, the data plane can process most packets at a linear
rate relative to that of the physical interfaces.
ADLINK PacketManager provides a range of customizable data plane
routines to classify the incoming packets based on traditional
destination IP as well as innovative flow tuples, then perform
deeper checking and processing such as flow analysis and
content inspection, and finally execute pre-defined actions
on the matched packets, such as drop, mirror, QoS, or
forwarding.
The data plane also includes hardware acceleration
components, including data encryption/
decryption, compression/decompression,
and regular expression handling, to
help offload valuable CPU resources
that can be used for other packet
processing tasks.
ADLINK PacketManager can be easily used by
customers to develop and deploy mainstream
applications, especially for applications which require
high performance packet processing ability and a wide
range of protocol support, such as:
- L2/L3 switching/routing
- L4/L7 load balancing
- Deep Packet Inspection (DPI)
- Next-generation firewall, security gateway
- 3G/LTE/C-RAN network traffic offloader/accelerator
- Wi-Fi access point controller
- SDN/NFC solutions
PacketManager
Network Software that Consolidates Packet
Processing Functionality for Telecom and Networking
Applications
PacketManager is an abstracted software package designed for
telecom, networking, security equipment to accelerate and enrich
packet processing capabilities
Learn more about PacketManager