Independent Testing for Network Hardware

Thomas Maufer tmaufer at gmail.com
Thu Jul 24 18:59:49 UTC 2008


</lurk>

I apologize for neglecting to mention the excellent test labs I've worked
with in Europe, including EANTC (in Germany) and West Coast Labs (in Wales,
I believe). Both are highly reputable and have access to lots of test
equipment (and they know how to use it!).

<lurk>




On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 11:13 PM, Thomas Maufer <tmaufer at gmail.com> wrote:

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



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