Independent Testing for Network Hardware

Tue Jul 22 06:13:05 UTC 2008

Isocore is good, but there are many others to choose from: Network Test,
ExtremeLabs, Miercom, Core Competence, Opus One, in no particular order. I
can personally recommend all of those (I have no experience with Tolly so I
can't recommend them).

If you are really interested in application performance, a lab is probably a
better choice than a hardware purchase since they can help you interpret the
results, especially if you'll be like most test equipment users (having test
equipment used more than 10% of the time is rare). The results you'll get
from Ixia's and Spirent's load testing tools are pretty cut and dried...very
straightforward to interpret but depending on your application maybe
relatively meaningless. For application performance, there are many tools
you could consider, many of which are very specialized and thus don't have
broad applicability.

I'd recommend talking to any of the labs above and see what kind of testing
they would use in a given situation before you run out and buy some test
equipment. Good luck!

On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 10:09 AM, Tomas L. Byrnes <tomb at byrneit.net> wrote:

> For independent testing, Kevin Tolly's been at it a long time, and has
> shown himself to be fair.
>
> http://www.tolly.com/
>
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Sean Hafeez [mailto:sah.list at gmail.com]
> > Sent: Friday, July 18, 2008 2:07 PM
> > To: Frank P. Troy
> > Cc: rpapneja at isocore.com; nanog at merit.edu
> > Subject: Re: Independent Testing for Network Hardware
> >
> > IXIA makes a nice product depending on what you want to do. I
> > have one here with some 10G line cards.
> >
> > -Sean
> >
> > On Jul 10, 2008, at 3:02 PM, Frank P. Troy wrote:
> >
> > > I can recommend Isocore http://www.isocore.com/ (the same
> > folks that
> > > run the MPLS conference).  Talk to Rajiv Papneja
> > > [rpapneja at isocore.com].
> > >
> > > Regards,
> > > Frank
> > >
> > > ------------------------------------
> > >   Frank P. Troy
> > >   703-396-8700
> > >   frank at troy-networks.com
> > > -------------------------------------
> > >
> > >
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: Brian Knoll (TT) [mailto:Brian.Knoll at tradingtechnologies.com]
> > > Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2008 11:16 AM
> > > To: nanog at merit.edu
> > > Subject: Independent Testing for Network Hardware
> > >
> > > Can anyone recommend a reliable independent testing company
> > that tests
> > > network hardware performance?
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > We are considering buying testing hardware (right now we
> > are looking
> > > at Spirent TestCenter) and I wanted to see if there were other
> > > options...
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > Brian Knoll
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> >
> >
> >
>
>