Network Performance Testing

Gale Technologies - silent?

Does anyone know what's happened with Gale Technologies?  Their news page has been empty for months, and the only other updates are a few customer stories... Many of you will remember that Gale was formed by the merger of QuikCycle and Edentree which I wrote about back in October.  Both were pretty major players in lab and test automation.   I sure hope we'll see something new from them soon! UPDATE: They are very much still alive - I bumped into some of them a few days ago at the TesLA Alliance Quarterly Meeting.

Test Automation Standard

Some really good news today - the TesLA Alliance announced the first draft of a test automation standard.  I'm really excited to see this at the TesLA quarterly meeting coming up next week, which I will be attending. TesLA is also hosting their first of a series of webinars starting this week.  The first one is entitled "Open Testing Standards Emerge: Enabling Seamless, Shareable and Platform-Independent Automation" and features HP ProCurve's Vince Mendoza who is part of the TesLA Customer Advisory Board.

Spirent announces HyperMetrics

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.

BreakingPoint VMware VMotion support

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.

New device for testing CIFS and NFS

Found a new vendor of CIFS and NFS testing equipment - SwiftTest. At least one former Spirent employee is part of the company, and the SwiftTest 3000 seems pretty well thought out for the needs of these protocols. There are a handful of other test options out there for CIFS and NFS, but many of them have extremely limited server-side functionality. I'm hoping these folks have the whole solution for those of us (like me) that need to test CIFS and NFS with all server and client options.