Innovation Pipeline

Next-generation applications like video conferencing, supercomputer clustering and data-storage networking all require connectivity speeds of 10 Gbps or faster. But as packets of data cross the network at a faster clip, it becomes more difficult to detect and defend against attacks. Unfortunately, most security devices on the market aren’t up to the job. MetaNetworks Technologies, in San Jose, California, has developed hardware that incorporates open-source software capable of analyzing network traffic at high data rates.

The company’s core innovation is a multiple instruction single data (MISD) computational model that has demonstrated “orders of magnitude” performance improvements in intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDPS), MetaNetworks says. MISD is more efficient at sampling data packets and can exploit a much higher level of parallelism intrinsic in IDPS workloads, says the company.

MetaNetworks has filed three patents on innovations in the application of the MISD model to IDPS. It’s now selling its MTP-1G card, which it claims is the world’s first wire-speed IDPS able to secure 10 Gbps networks. The MTP-1G is based on MetaNetworks’ Meta Traffic Processor, a network processor developed with grants from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Air Force Rome Laboratories. The MTP uses massive, fine-grain, instruction-level parallelism.

“With our technology, similar performance can be achieved even as networks scale to 100 Gbps,” says MetaNetworks CEO Joe Sigrist. “Current IDPS systems incur significant latencies at just 1 Gbps.”

Metanetworks Technologies is a spinoff of Metanetworks, a networking-security firm founded by Livio Ricciulli, a former research scientist at SRI. To date, early customers include the U.S. Department of Energy and the Department of Defense, as well as several universities and corporations that MetaNetworks will not name at this time.

Competitors potentially include more mainstream IDPS vendors, such as ForeScout and Top Layer. But Metanetworks says it’s eager to form licensing partnerships with established IDPS vendors so that they can deploy their devices in high-speed networks. The MTP-10G, for instance, includes a set of APIs that make it compatible with other popular network-monitoring applications. “There are a lot of folks we could partner with to solve their 10-gig problem,” says Sigrist.

Analysis: MetaNetworks recently received a $500,000 research grant from the National Science Foundation. This is the first outside funding for the company. Analysts believe MetaNetworks is at the intersection of two growing markets: IDPS and 10 Gpbs. Infonetics predicts the hardware portion of the IDPS market will reach $1.3 billion in 2006, up from just $176 million in 2002. According to a report by the Dell’Oro Group, shipments of 10-gigabit ports are growing at an annual rate of nearly 70 percent. –Tom Stein