Network Integration Guide › Introduction › Hardware Specifications › Bivio Hardware Specification

Bivio Hardware Specification

The Bivio 2000 and Bivio 7000 use a combination of general-purpose PowerPC processors running the Linux operating system and a powerful network processor to provide a high-speed network packet analysis platform.

The main components are the chassis, the Network Processor Card, an Applications Processor Card (optional on Bivio 7000 appliances) and a Network Interface Module.

Chassis

This contains dual redundant hot swap load-sharing power supplies and two sets of monitored fans linked to software alarms. The twin hard-disks are in a RAID-1 configuration (each store the same data, so that data is not lost if one disk fails).

Network Interface Module (NIM)

CA DLP Network appliances contain a custom multi-port Gigabit Ethernet (10/100/1000BASE-T) module with a configurable hardware bypass. This hardware bypass is triggered by power failure events or system failure events to guarantee that when the NBA is connected in series with the network, connectivity is assured.

• Bivio 2000 appliances contain a 4-port Ethernet module.
• Bivio 7000 appliances contain an 8-port Ethernet module.

Network Processor Card (NPC)

The Network Processor Card combines hardware and software to deliver accelerated packet processing and load sharing of CPUs for application processing.

• On Bivio 2000 appliances, the NPC has a controller CPU and 2 Application Processor CPUs. Each Application CPU subsystem has 1.5 GB of memory for applications and packet buffering.
• On Bivio 7000 appliances, the NPC has a controller CPU and 4 Application Processor CPUs. Each Application CPU subsystem has 2.0 GB of memory for applications and packet buffering. Optional SSL decode acceleration cards can be fitted, allocating one SSL accelerator chip to each CPU.

Application Processor Card (APC)

The Application Processor Card is connected to the Network Processor Card via the NBA's high speed full duplex bus. The stack bus technology also enables linear scaling of application processing power and internal failover communication.

The APC hardware consists of multiple high-end server-class PowerPC CPUs:

• On Bivio 2000 appliances, the APC is fitted as standard and contains 4 CPUs, each rated at 3000 MIPS (millions of instructions per second), increasing the performance available to CA DLP Network to 18,000 MIPS.
• On Bivio 7000 appliances, the APC is an optional feature that contains 8 CPUs, each rated at 3750 MIPS, increasing the performance available from 15,000 MIPS to 45,000 MIPS.

  Optional SSL decode acceleration cards can be fitted, allocating one SSL accelerator chip to each CPU.

  Note: Bivio 7000 appliances have further performance enhancing features, so the Bivio 7000 MIP count represents higher performance than a Bivio 2000 MIP count.

Traffic enters the CA DLP Network appliance through an industry standard network interface located on the NIM.

The CA DLP Network appliance is a 2RU box. It is delivered with mounting brackets for 19-inch racks.