Deduplication

In some situations, when network traffic is analyzed, large amounts of duplicate frames are received. For server applications analyzing such traffic, it can be very time-consuming to recognize and discard these frames.

Napatech NT Family Network Adapters implement a deduplication functionality that can remove duplicate frames, so that only unique frames (according to the classification criteria) are transferred to the server application. This saves a substantial amount of server CPU cycles and, for applications storing the network data to disk, also large amounts of disk space.

The adapter hardware deduplication functionality can be configured with respect to:

• The number of consecutive frames being compared
• The maximum time between frames being compared
• The part of the frames being compared (e.g. exclusion of encapsulations)
  
• The ports being compared
  

A separate counter reports the number of duplicate frames that are discarded.

The Deduplication functionality can detect and remove 98% of duplicate frames in typical situations. This will off-load the host CPU from a significant amount of duplicate frame processing.