Network Performance Testing

Interesting article and video on BreakingPoint’s site about a recent test of a Juniper Networks SRX5800 @ 150 Gbps – 109Gbps of blended application traffic and live security attacks, 30Gbps of intrusion prevention.  Quite a lot of traffic all at one time.

I’m sure this was possible as part of BreakingPoint’s other breakthrough back in February on inventing a new architecture to deliver 40Gbps of blended traffic from one device.

The most interesting thing to me is the blended application traffic approach – being able to use their library of application protocols in a blend for a more realistic test scenario.  I know many of the other vendors in this space have good application support, but the act of configuring a more realistic traffic mix always seems to be way too hard to configure, and usually beyond a test engineers patience threshold.

Given where this industry is today, more wizard-ized or componentized solutions are necessary to allow customers to get the most out of their test equipment.  Providing all of the bells and whistles, the dials to change everything, used to be the main thing I remember asking for from test vendors.  This was when you needed the extra SSL cipher support, or the option in the HTTP header to do something.  Don’t get me wrong, this is still a requirement, it’s just expected now that when a vendor comes out with protocol support, that it’s supported from end to end, just like a client would have.

But now, we need easier ways to configure a more realistic traffic profile, network profile, WAN profile, etc.  Being able to sniff stuff off the wire and create a traffic mix is a great way to approach this, but not all that easy to do.  The next best thing is providing easier ways to configure mixes of traffic all at one time.  It sounds like BreakingPoint is on the right track here, and to boot, it’s really fast!