Independent Testing for Network Hardware

Tue Jul 22 06:29:23 UTC 2008

I do highly recommend Core Competence, especially for security gear.
Dave Piscitello is the real deal.

________________________________

	From: Thomas Maufer [mailto:tmaufer at gmail.com] 
	Sent: Monday, July 21, 2008 11:13 PM
	To: Sean Hafeez
	Cc: Frank P. Troy; nanog at merit.edu; rpapneja at isocore.com; Tomas
L. Byrnes
	Subject: Re: Independent Testing for Network Hardware

	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
		> >
		> >
		> >
		> >
		> >
		> >
		> >
		>
		>
		>