Almost a decade ago Dr Ian Graham was in Europe for a series of conferences and I have met him in person along with other people from Politecnico di Torino, that were developing winpcap (one of the key guys of the group, Loris Degioanni, at that time was visiting Endace, thus was not present at the meeting. Loris later become a successful entrepreneur having founded Cace, now Riverbed). For me it was a big pleasure to have such meeting, as Endace was in the early days (and also all of us) and still a sort of University spin-off. The nice thing about Endace was its attitude to be open to the research world, this when they were not yet a world leader. Since that day, I have been in touch with Endace as ntop has been one of the 3rd party apps supported by their platform, and also we’ve done some projects together a few years ago, not to mention a great lunch with its CTO in a great restaurant on a wine cellar in the Chianti valley a couple of years ago.
As all of you know, PF_RING is doing its best to improve packet capture, but competing against a DAG card is quite challenging. Last week Endace donated us a 10 Gbit NIC, for making sure that the ntop apps suite are running nicely on top of their cards.
Many thanks to Endace for challenging us again!