Network Performance Testing

I’ve been looking forward to evaluating BreakingPoint’s Elite system for some time.  Over a year ago, I had the chance to see their previous system, the 10K, but at the time it couldn’t test the device that my company makes, so we moved on.

We have the Elite in house now, and so far it’s interesting.  So far the evaluation is going well – I’m on my own much of this week (by design) to fumble around and find the different things I’m interested in.  So far I have successful connection per second and throughput tests going through our device under test, and have fiddled with a bunch of the options to tune things exactly the way I want.

There’s a lot left to figure out – perhaps I’ll post some of my thoughts later this week after we’re done.

Check out a conversation I had recently with Kyle Flaherty over at BreakingPoint on the evolution of performance testers….

One of the best posts in a long time that I’ve read was from Dennis Cox over at BreakingPoint.  The full article can be found here.

I particularly enjoy his opinion on the rest of the market, and the other Big Two.  I also really enjoy the fact that the rest of the market does seem to be looking at what BreakingPoint is doing, and starting to mimic them.

Personally, I’m very excited about the new things that BreakingPoint is bringing to the market, and looking forward to many new strides there going forward…

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!

BreakingPoint announced that they can now emulate VMotion traffic.

Pretty neat idea for those companies out there that have products that work with VMotion – a convenient way of having the ability to emulate this without using the real thing. Speaking from personal experience, it’s pretty hard to get VMotion setup for a large deployment, and even more difficult if you want all of the other pieces and parts working together. Once you have it set up, you’re not likely going to want to experiment with it to prove something works faster or slower.

I hope this helps folks developing acceleration and optimization products for VMware and VMotion.

It’s interesting that a lot of the industry is focusing on chat and messenger protocols, along with things like P2P and file sharing.

BreakingPoint announced recently that they added support for Windows Live Messenger – their list of supported protocols in this area now includes AIM, IRC, Jabber, Windows Live and Yahoo!.

Most of this seems to be focused on service provider testing, but I’m still really curious because there aren’t thousands of SP’s out there that would buy features like this, at least I don’t think there are…..

Is it really that important to have these protocols for the Enterprise or other markets? Or is there really a huge SP market, and I’m just out of touch?

At least in my day to day, I don’t test with these protocols, and probably would only ever use them to show traffic mixes that are more realistic, but it wouldn’t matter if the protocols were exactly specific to the provider (AIM, Yahoo!, etc.). Something generic would be fine with me.

Full press release can be found here.

BreakingPoint has been working on a bunch of methodologies that have surfaced here as well (thanks Kyle!), and announced recently this new overview on deep packet inspection.

I think it’s great that these folks are taking the time to create and write materials like this to help folks in the industry understand how to use their device to better test equipment.

Full press release can be found here.