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Networking specialist Spirent Communications announced the launch of Avalanche Next, a platform designed to test the performance, scalability and security of application-aware network infrastructures by generating authentic traffic and attacks.
Avalanche Next combines Avalanche’s performance testing with Spirent Studio’s threats and application emulation capabilities, and lets organizations verify the accuracy of application detection engines and policies by testing with thousands of popular application profiles.
The platform provides multi-10G bps testing with authentic payloads based on actual application transactions and usage for realistic security, load and functional testing, and can evaluate the impact of security policies on application performance with intermixed attacks, as well as re-create production-level mixes of application traffic and test the effectiveness of application quality-of-service (QoS) policies.
“The Avalanche Next interface brings accessibility, simplicity and power to application and security testing,” David Newman, founder of Network Test, said in a statement. “It’s available through any Web browser, making it accessible from virtually anywhere, from any system. The intuitive interface makes it easy to select from a wide range of enterprise applications. And although the new interface is simple and streamlined, it leverages all the power of the Avalanche and Studio Performance traffic generation engines.”
The solution boasts more than 7 million connections per second, which can re-create seasonal, weekly or special event user spike scenarios to verify how the device or network will react. In addition, integrated protocol fuzzing finds unknown or Zero Day vulnerabilities before they happen so the impact on security systems can be benchmarked and characterized.
Also included is the ability to verify the capacity of the network device to detect and mitigate thousands of known attacks, test the resiliency of network devices and deployed protocols by verifying their ability to deal with millions of unexpected and malicious inputs, and test device capabilities to inspect traffic for malware, infected hosts, unwanted URLs and spam and take appropriate action.
“Avalanche Next offers product development and IT operations teams an advantage by helping them bring solutions and services to market quickly, with proven scalability, security and performance capabilities,” Jeff Schmitz, chief marketing officer at Spirent, said in a statement. “Unlike other products that continuously generate the same traffic, Avalanche Next provides multi-10G bps testing with authentic payloads based on actual application transactions and usage for realistic security, load and functional testing.”
The company recently announced the latest version of the Intel architecture-based Spirent hardware architecture for testing mobile and cloud applications on converged IP and Ethernet networks, which utilizes the Intel Atom processor C2000 product family. This evolution further enhances Spirent’s current Intel architecture which supports converged testing of mobile and cloud applications with security while still testing L2/L3 infrastructure.
