CS-2000 Open Network Services Platform for developers of high-speed, high-capacity, deep packet processing applications

June 21, 2004

5 Min Read

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- CloudShield® Technologies, Inc. today announced the CS-2000 Open Network Services Platform (ONSP) for developers of high-speed, high-capacity deep packet processing applications. By providing an innovative, universal platform on which to build their network applications, the CS-2000 ONSP provides the fastest path to market for solutions providers and systems integrators – saving them and their customers considerable time and money.

With the CS-2000 ONSP, solutions providers can quickly develop and deploy valuable services to their customers including DDOS mitigation, worm mitigation, intrusion prevention, virtualized firewalls and traffic measurement and control capabilities. The CS-2000 ONSP is a programmable system that offers total packet inspection and analysis, and 100% traffic visibility for multi-gigabit network applications. Historically, OEMs have been forced to build their own ASIC-, FPGA- or NPU-based systems at costs into the tens of millions of dollars and years of development time. The CS-2000 provides a ready platform that can deliver ASIC-like performance for a wide-range of network security, traffic management and network management applications used in service provider, government, and large enterprise networks.

“We sought a hardware partner that provides our customers with the performance and scalability necessary to deliver innovative security solutions at a reasonable cost,” said Tom Arthur, President and CEO of Arbor Networks. “Our Peakflow SP integration with the CS-2000, enables service providers to filter Denial of Service attacks in carrier class networks, at line-speed.”

The CS-2000 combines the following industry-leading solutions:

  • RAVE™ – an easy-to-use data plane programming language for the CS-2000 platform that facilitates the rapid development of scalable high-performance packet processing applications;

  • CloudShield Packet Operating System (CPOS™) – a run-time operating system that orchestrates the CS-2000 platform data plane resources to perform the packet operations (packet read, table lookup, string search, variable update, packet capture, packet write, etc.) called within RAVE applications; and,

  • CloudShield Silicon Database (CSDB™)- a high-speed memory-resident data base situated directly in the data plane. Silicon Database access times are nearly instantaneous with look-up tables scaling to millions of entries. Database management can be controlled programmatically, through a command line interface, or through a client graphical user interface and table updates are dynamic with individual entries added, deleted, or modified between packets to ensure 100% protection.

“Where we are seeing the most need is in the federal and service provider markets where high performance network exists and services either need to be enhanced to meet increased capacity demands or new services are needed which can not be quickly or easily developed,” said Rusty Cumpston, CloudShield’s CEO. “The CS-2000 provides them with a ready platform using off-the-shelf hardware technology that delivers industry-leading performance without the hardware development complexity and cost. Our partners – whether they be government systems integrators, solutions providers or large end-users – are finding that our platforms provide them with the fastest way to bring new applications on-line, enabling them to go after more business and extend the reach of their existing products.”

The CS-2000 ONSP can scale from 2 Gbps capacity to 5 Gbps capacity in a single 2RU chassis with prices starting at $49,000.

In a separate release:

CloudShield® Technologies, Inc., developer of Open Network Services Platforms™ (ONSPs), today announced a new integrated development environment for software developers who want to quickly develop and deliver high-speed applications. The Open Network Services IDE™ is a powerful application design tool for the CS-2000 ONSP, enabling applications that require deep packet processing to be easily developed and quickly deployed.

Built by industry leading software engineers with years of experience developing high performance routing, switching and traffic management applications, the Open Network Services (ONS) IDE is a comprehensive suite of tools that enable rapid development of network security and traffic management applications for demanding high-speed, high-volume networks. When combined with the CS-2000 ONSP the need for costly custom hardware development and complex device driver and micro-code programming are eliminated, and new network services and applications are ready in days or weeks instead of months or years.

“Instead of perpetuating a closed network solutions model, CloudShield has developed an innovative solution that offers applications providers an open programmable packet processing server,” said Michael Kennedy, Managing Partner of Network Strategy Partners, LLC. “CloudShield’s ONS IDE and RAVE enable solutions providers to rapidly develop the applications suite their target markets demand and the flexibility to keep pace with their changing needs.”

The ONS IDE includes advances in CloudShield’s RAVE data plane programming language including adding over 200 new functions and a C-like programming interface. Additionally, the ONS IDE, built on the open source Eclipse framework, offers the following key functions:

  • RAVE source code editing, compilation, and run-time simulation on the developer’s PC

  • Step-based debugging with commonly-formatted network traffic files;

  • Visual-RAVE for mapping and understanding of packet processing logic;

  • CVS version control for maintaining consistent code set; and,

  • A wide range of open source plug-ins to enrich the developer’s work space.

    Several optional RAVE utility programs are available for the ONS IDE to help jump-start developer’s projects. These utilities, including a scalable ACL engine, a full traffic (non-sampling) NetFlow data export engine, an instant messenger control application, and others, provide the developer with insights into how to apply advanced RAVE techniques within their projects as well as re-useable source code for their applications.

"CloudShield's high-potential technology has helped us provide numerous innovative solutions for our government customers," said Jeff Steiner, Director of Program Development for Data Systems Operations in the Command, Control, and Intelligence Division of Northrop Grumman Mission Systems. "We believe CloudShield offers a unique technology and approach to solving a variety of difficult challenges and are using it to power complex system solutions. The new product advancements are extremely timely, and we intend to apply the updated hardware and development environment to continue meeting the needs of our customers."

“RAVE has been successfully used by several systems integrator and ISV partners to extend the range of functionality of existing applications and to develop new ones,” said Peder Jungck, CTO and Founder of CloudShield. “The ONS IDE brings RAVE into mainstream programming practices and into a rich IDE environment. As a result RAVE more easily supports large and complex team-based development projects.

The ONS IDE is available now for evaluation in a beta release. General availability for the ONS IDE will be in the third quarter of this year with prices starting at $10,000.

CloudShield Technologies Inc.

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