Mellanox buys network intelligence tech developer Titan IC

Mellanox Technologies Ltd, a supplier of end-to-end, smart interconnect solutions for data centre servers and storage systems, has agreed to acquire privately-held Titan IC Systems Ltd.

Titan is a developer of network intelligence (NI) and security technology to accelerate search and big data analytics across a broad range of applications in data centres worldwide.

The acquisition will further strengthen Mellanox’s network intelligence capabilities delivered through the company’s advanced ConnectX and BlueField families of SmartNIC and I/O Processing Unit (IPU) solutions.Titan IC’s team in Belfast, Northern Ireland will become the centre of advanced network intelligence research and development for Mellanox.

“Network Intelligence is an important technology when combined with our networking portfolio of switches, SmartNICs, and IPUs,” says Eyal Waldman, president and CEO Mellanox Technologies. “Our customers will benefit from the deep analytics and enhanced security that will be delivered by the integration of our best-in-class Ethernet and InfiniBand products and world-leading deep packet inspection and analytics technologies from Titan IC. With this acquisition, our M&A (mergers & acquisitions) investments total more than US$1.2 billion (€1.08 billion) to date and more than $53 million (€47 million) invested in start-ups to further our intelligent networking strategy.”

Noel McKenna, CEO of Titan IC, added: “We are pleased to become part of Mellanox and together we will accelerate the pace of innovation and will advance network intelligence to new levels of performance and insight. We have worked with Mellanox for many years to integrate our RXP regular expression processor into their advanced line of BlueField I/O Processing Units (IPUs). Now as part of Mellanox, we will be able to achieve new capabilities for cyber intelligence, intrusion detection and protection, and advanced data analytics applications.”

Titan IC is a specialist in high-speed complex pattern matching and real-time internet traffic inspection for advanced cyber security and data analytics applications. The highly sophisticated RXP hardware network intelligence acceleration engine, offloads regular expressions (RegEx) string and malware matching, freeing up CPU cores and delivering faster throughput and increased efficiency.

The RXP engine’s unique ability to simultaneously handle high throughput, rule depth, and complexity is an ideal complement to Mellanox high performance BlueField IPU based solutions, which include line-rate network, storage, and crypto accelerators at speeds up to 200 Gb/s. The combination aims to delivers “unmatched network intelligence capabilities making BlueField the perfect solution for a wide range of applications” such as stateful firewalls, load balancers, intrusion detection and prevention, deep packet inspection, application recognition, lawful interception, government, logfile analytics, in-storage search and many more.

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