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.