Member Profile: Spirent Communications

http://www.spirentcom.com/

"Our collaboration with Spirent is playing a critical role in helping the Internet2 community understand the issues around implementing next generation networking technologies. Spirent equipment provides the networking community a common yardstick by which to measure new IPv6 equipment performance prior to deployment."
- John P. Streck, director of the CENTAUR Lab at North Carolina State University

Spirent Communications and Internet2

Spirent Communications' engineers are collaborating with researchers, teachers and students in the Internet2 community, using the high performance network environments to develop practices and new solutions that optimize bandwidth; isolate network, transport and application layer processing needs; and test a network’s ability to work under unprecedented loads and conditions.

Spirent is a worldwide provider of integrated performance analysis and service assurance systems for next-generation network technologies. Spirent’s products and services accelerate the successful development and deployment of network equipment and services by emulating real-world conditions in the lab and assuring end-to-end performance of large-scale networks.

Spirent is partnering with industry leaders and the academic and government research community to help enable the highest possible performance for the next-generation Internet, which requires thorough and rigorous testing. The company is working closely with the Intnernet2 community to establish a sophisticated nationwide network testing and monitoring capability. The North Carolina Internet2 Technology Evaluation Center (NC-ITEC), one of three ITECs that test hardware and applications before they are deployed in the Internet2 network infrastructure, is using Spirent’s products to validate the ability of the Abilene backbone to support high-bandwidth applications being developed by the Internet2 community.

In the lab, the NC-ITEC makes extensive use of Spirent’s SmartBits, Adtech and CAW product lines to validate the performance and functionality of advanced services such as IPv6, multicast and MPLS. For Layer 1-3 testing, SmartBits provides a high-port density platform for emulating large numbers of end systems and routers, while the Adtech platform provides finely detailed performance analysis and emulation. The CAW product line provides performance evaluation for Layers 4 – 7.

Spirent and the ITECs are actively involved in testing and experimentation on the Abilene backbone as well. Using the Spirent AX/4000, NC-ITEC engineers recently performed the first cross-country performance tests on the first phase of the next-generation 10 Gbps Abilene backbone. The intent of the test was to evaluate the performance capabilities of the new network, as well as to find any bugs or configuration issues that needed addressing as the network was being constructed. During the build-out, NC-ITEC engineers were able to successfully generate greater than 8 Gbps of test traffic coast-to-coast using both IPv4 and IPv6 protocols. With the addition of normal user traffic already flowing, some backbone links saw an aggregate traffic load of greater than 9 Gbps during the test.

The unique combination of skill sets and state-of-the-art test equipment gathered at the ITECs allow advanced network applications to be analyzed in ways not otherwise possible. The results of the collaboration not only benefit the Internet2 community, but also provide valuable results that Spirent can use as it develops its next generation of products and services, providing its customers worldwide the benefits of its collaboration within the Internet2 community.