Network Performance Testing

What happened to the Performance Harness Project?

Some of you have emailed asking what has happened to the Performance Harness Project I started writing about a few months ago.  I wanted to give you all an update... The project started as something I was spearheading myself, and has since taken on a life of it's own.  It's now an official project with larger involvement, which means that it slows down a bit :)  I hope to have some more details in early January as we flesh out the new architecture we'll be using for the system. Developers on my team have spent the last month prototyping a new reservation and scheduling system that will allow us to control more devices from a central point within our automation.  This will include things like L1/L2/L3 switches, our own product, and various test harnesses from IXIA, Spirent, ANUE, and others.  Part of this framework will be used in this new harness.   What we foresee right now is a mixed harness - automated build testing during the day using our customized framework, and more complex customer scenarios during the night, using IXIA Test Conductor. We have set aside two brand-new IXIA Acceleron-NP cards for this project - a huge amount of test capacity (more than 7 times what we originally had dedicated to the project) and re-tooled some of the ANUE and Spirent equipment involved.  We also may be adding some larger 10GB switches to support the different devices we're planning on testing. More details in a few weeks!

Spirent?

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.