COMPUTER NETWORK CARDS

NBC Contracting Office intends to solicit on a sole source basis under the authority of FAR 6.302-1 to Catapult Networks, LLC. This is the only source and no other supplies or services will satisfy agency requirements. Catapult Networks, LLC. Specialized network adapters are required to "funnel" network traffic and split the data streams in order to feed the traffic into EID's Threat Management network security tools. Specifically, PCAPX NT20/NT4 adapters capture and classify packets in real-time, at 100% line rate, and without packet loss, under all network traffic conditions. Using multi-packet DMA and a zero copy architecture, they stream captured traffic directly to the host CPU's application memory space, removing common software bottlenecks associated with packet inspection and flow analysis.EID has not been able to identify another product in the industry that has the ability to provide specialized network cards that act as traffic scatterers for Intrusion Detection System load balancing between cores and processes. The only available vendors are Endace and PcapExpress. The PcapExpress cards provide 4 ethernet ports per card (Endace provides only two) along with the ability to have 32 streams of traffic (Endace provides only 4). This allows for an extreme increase in performance and monitoring capability as we can map up to 32 streams of data at a 1:1 ratio per cores within the server. Servers currently being acquired will be quad processor, quad core systems. This will allow us to use up to 16 of the available 32 streams. This allows us to pracitcally monitor four times the amount of traffic using the PcapExpress cards over th Endace cards with Snort/IDS and monitor eight times the traffic over the Endace card. Additionally, the PcapExpress cards provide much more functionality and flexibility in terms of how virtual interfaces can be created, configured and also how much physical memory can be allocated per stream of traffic.A determination by the Government not to complete this proposed effort on a full and open competition basis, based upon responses to this notice, is solely within the discretion of the government. Oral communications are not acceptable in response to this notice. No RFP will be issued based upon this Notice to Intent. Interested parties may submit any information for consideration by the Government to [email protected]