Interface Masters Launches 10 Gigabit Layer 2 - 4 Hardware Loadbalancer With Quad 10G Active Bypass Segments

SAN JOSE, CA--(Marketwire - Jul 25, 2011) - Interface Masters Technologies, an industry leader and innovator in networking solutions, today announced a 24 port 10G L2-L4 hardware loadbalancer with Quad 10G active bypass segments. Niagara 2804 is the first member of the hardware loadbalancer family supporting 10G active bypass functionality to ensure maximum reliability and uptime upon in-line network appliance failures and/or crashes. This special family consists of Single, Dual and Quad segment options where each traffic segment can be distributed to up to 16 monitoring appliances or 8 in-line appliances that are monitored by an auto sensing heartbeat that can report on appliance malfunction at 10ns resolution. The Niagara 2804 is built for optimal flexibility, enabling extensive filtering capabilities, L2, L3 and L4 networking support, advanced mirroring of network traffic, sophisticated session based traffic distribution, and traffic aggregation. Niagara 2804 supports 4 bypass segments of 10G multi-mode, single-mode and/or extended-mode fiber and 16 SFP+ and/or SFP ports for packet management including aggregation, distribution, filtering and mirroring. Niagara 2804 possesses powerful & full-featured GUI and CLI interfaces that can be managed remotely via the management port or console port, enabling easy drag-and-drop network management, simple configuration and statistics retrieval.

Niagara 2804's state-of-the-art active bypass capabilities ensure maximum uptime on any network-critical link. During normal and healthy in-line appliance operation, Niagara 2804 routes all network traffic through the in-line appliance. When Niagara 2804 detects an appliance malfunction such as a software crash, system failure or loss of power, the in-line traffic continues to flow through the network link, but is no longer routed through the in-line device. This ensures that network devices can be removed and replaced without network downtime. Once the system is back up or the power is restored to the appliance, network traffic is seamlessly diverted back to the in-line device, allowing it to resume its in-line functions. In addition, the Niagara 2804 is an ideal solution for applications requiring high availability/redundancy, providing primary and secondary appliance pairs with sophisticated High Availability (HA) fail-safe functionality.

"Niagara 2804 is a first-of-its-kind sophisticated data access system that supports 10 Gigabit active bypass to ensure both granular packet management while providing failover functionality to ensure uptime is maintained in the case of in-line devices failure," states Ben Askarinam, founder and CEO of Interface Masters Technologies. "The system enables in-depth packet manipulation including mirroring, filtering, distribution, aggregation and MPLS packet support to manage complex traffic flows and architectures and provides 920 Gbps throughput capacity at 1U form factor and less than 150W of power consumption."

Niagara 2804 provides features that are essential in today's data centers:

• 16 Bidirectional and configurable hardware loadbalancer ports supporting comprehensive speed (1Gb or 10Gb), media (fiber LR, SR, ER, SX, LX or copper) and functionality
• Support for 8 in-line appliances monitored by an auto sensing heartbeat that can report on appliance malfunction at a 10ns resolution
• 4 network segments (4 ports each) supporting 10G bypass supporting fiber media including 10GBASE-SR, 10GBASE-LR, 10GBASE-ER
• Versatile & extensive traffic distribution options: MPLS, MAC, VLAN, IP, TCP and UDP
• Enables multiple appliances to monitor network segments by session based load balancing
• MPLS tunnel termination
• Multiple traffic Mirroring, aggregation and redirection options including one-to-one, many-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many mappings of network links
• Wire speed L2-L4 Filtering capabilities based on Protocol, Source and Destination IP address, MAC address, UDP/TCP ports and VLAN tags
• User Defined Bytes (UDB) with visibility into the first 128 packet bytes
• Active switching of traffic in case of system failure
• Passive Bypass which is essential during power loss
• High Availability failover capabilities
• Advanced Management Capabilities including Syslog, TACACS+, RMON, secure WEB GUI and CLI management, SSH and HTTPS support
• 1U rack mountable chassis
• Hot Swappable Dual Redundant Internal power supplies & reversible fans
• Full RoHS compliance
• FCC, CE, UL compliance

Pricing and Availability

The Niagara 2804 is designed for the System Integration, Telecommunications, ISP, IT Network Security, UTM, Storage Area Networks (SAN), Intrusion Detection & Prevention and WAN Acceleration markets. The product will be available for evaluation in early August 2011 and will be in production in September.

For pricing information, please contact the Interface Masters' sales team at sales@interfacemasters.com or follow the link: http://www.interfacemasters.com/products/2804.html

About Interface Masters Technologies

Interface Masters Technologies is a leading vendor in the Bypass and TAP Networking market, based in the heart of the Silicon Valley. Interface Masters' expertise lies in Gigabit and 10 Gb Ethernet networking solutions that integrate with monitoring, in-line networking, IPS, UTM, Load Balancing WAN acceleration and other mission-critical IT and security appliances. Flagship product lines include specialized 10GE internal server adapter cards, SSL/IPSEC adapters, 10Gb media converters, embedded switch boards, 10GE Managed Switches, 10 Gigabit external intelligent Network TAP, Bypass and failover systems that increase network monitoring capabilities, network reliability and in-line appliance availability. For more information, please go to www.interfacemasters.com