Network Performance Testing

Hope everyone is having a good holiday season.

I wanted to post more of a question than anything.  At my work, and in several consulting related situations, I interact with Spirent equipment for various testing needs.  In the last year, it has become progressively more difficult to get responses and information out of Spirent for a number of reasons.  This has ranged from support calls, to software fixes and questions, to sales inquiries.

Are others seeing this?

Spirent has a lot of equipment and customers, and I have been contacted by a number of existing Spirent customers with similar concerns over the last year.  Most people do not have the demands and requirements (at least those I talk to) that my company does for performance test vendors, and as such, haven’t run into any of the problems we’re experiencing, or at least not to the degree we are.  Another way of saying this – we feel the pain more than most, faster than most.

I wanted to see if others are experiencing similar issues, or if there are things I am not aware of that should factor into this opinion.

Spirent announced a few weeks ago a new solution, TestCenter Virtual, for validating the performance of all elements of the data center and cloud computing environments including virtual machines (VM), servers and storage devices.

In examining the details, it appears that TestCenter Virtual is a module that is installed in each VM which will allow for more granular control of the overall test by actually generating traffic from the VM’s themselves.

The product has been selected as a finalist for Best of Interop 2009.

I think it’s a great idea, along the lines of IxVM announced earlier this month by IXIA.  Allowing purpose-built performance test equipment to control virtual machines will allow for folks to validate all of the virtual infrastructure, and possibly also be a great way to scale testing without having to purchase more performance equipment.

I am very interested to see these products once they are out and available to the general public.

Spirent announced a new blade series for their Spirent Test Center chassis today called HyperMetrics.

At first review, it looks pretty interesting, especially for someone who’s interested in full capacity L4-L7 performance testing for HTTP and HTTPS.  The HyperMetrics AP module claims 400,000 transactions per second on a pair of cards, and HTTPS/SSL traffic of 3Gbps and 40,000 transactions per second.  The 400,000 tps number is nice to finally see out of the Spirent Test Center chassis lineup – this will be extremely useful at least for the L4-L7 market where devices are getting faster and faster each major release.

Spirent has traditionally had difficulties matching other vendors abilities in HTTPS, and in this hardware, it still appears to be a bit behind.  I assume this has to do with the small-quantity of CPUs and faster megahertz approach that Spirent takes over folks like IXIA, who use lots of small slower CPUs.

It seems Spirent has achieved a lot of this through the use of multi-core processors.  It also looks like using these cores within a card is now dynamic, which would really be useful for folks to distribute different types of tests within a single blade or chassis.  There’s also a statement on their site about this being the “Industry’s first multi-core, multi-threaded software and hardware architecture” which leads me to believe that the provisioning of CPU and network resources has been rewritten a lot for this new hardware.  This will allow for more efficient use of resources, IMHO.

One of the best parts of this is the reduction in ports.  IXIA did this over a year ago with their XMV12X cards which include 12 1Gbps ports, and 1 10Gbps aggregation port.  Spirent now has a high performance card that doesn’t require a lot of additional connections.   They have had, for a while, for those tracking things, a 10Gbps card for the Spirent Test Center, but it didn’t do L4-L7 very fast at all – I believe it was targeted at L2-L3 customers.

According to Spirent, demonstrations of Spirent TestCenter’s HyperMetrics are available at Spirent’s Proof of Concept (SPOC) Lab and collaboration centers in Sunnyvale, London and Beijing. I hope that I’ll get the opportunity to see one of these in action soon!

The full press release is here.

A pretty interesting press release from Spirent on the Industry’s Largest 10 Gigabit Ethernet Test.

Looks like they tested the new Cisco Nexus 7000 Data Center Switch with the Spirent Test Center chassis.

They tested 256 10GB ports and tested high availability, throughput, latency, and a bunch of other things.

Sounds like quite a switch. In particular I am interested in what 10GB cards were used on the switch, as well as all of the details on the Spirent Test Center chassis – was it one STC chassis, or multiple? What 10GB cards are used in the STC chassis? How long did the tests take to run?

I am hoping there will be a full report released with all details – since Network World was involved, it could be likely.