Spirent aims new products at network edge

Tipping its hand on where it sees the industry’s growth areas, Spirent Communications announced a slough of new products, upgrades and enhancements this week aimed primarily at broadband access, enterprise security, IP telephony and routing.

For broadband access equipment providers, Spirent's Router Performance Tester (RPT) platform now includes PPPoX Emulation test application capabilities that can define 32,000 subscribers on a single port of its AX/4000 RPT. The application can emulate any Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) session on OC-3 and OC12 ATM or 10/100 and Gigabit Ethernet channel.

“This product especially meets the requirements of doing large scale testing,” said Mark Fishburn, vice president of technical strategy for Spirent. “A single chassis can represent 256,000 subscribers all getting on the network, running traffic and leaving.”

With this new product, Spirent is trying to stay out in front of the new access products coming to market. “There is a whole new family of products coming out to the service providers and without this tool, they couldn’t prove to their potential customers whether or not their new service works. Nor could they prove it to themselves,” Fishburn said.

Also for broadband access, Spirent released a SmartBits TeraMetrics ATM interface for testing of next generation DSLAMs, metro edge and core routers. It can be used for both scalability testing and for performance by combining it with Spirent’s quality of service analysis software and TeraRouting tester. It will support over 8000 virtual circuits per port with two ports per module for more than 16,000 circuits.

Fishburn said the TeraMetrics card can test both copper Ethernet up to 1Gb and fiber Ethernet on the same board.

The SmartBits product line also plays role in Spirent’s enterprise security approach. In addition to doing performance analysis on network layers two through seven, the platform now supports testing for distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. This enhancement includes VLAN tagging, IP fragmentation, support for 10 GB Ethernet and dual media Ethernet.

“Even on a network that is not fully loaded, if it has to spend a lot of time defending itself against an attack it can seriously disrupt services,” Fishburn said.

Spirent also put out a new release (2.0) on its Abacus 5000 IP telephony platform. The test system verifies the performance, functionality and voice quality of softswitches, media gateways and IP telephony applications.

Routing performance testing got a new application bundle that supports the major MPLS VPN technologies and provides a platform for evaluating Layer 2 and Layer 3 MPLS VPN provider edge router implementations. The RPT framework enhancement (version 4.43) increases the speed and meaningfulness of testing results by providing a Web software update utility, example configuration files, a test scheduler for batch testing and way for users to define their own test scripts.

The company also added several software enhancements to the SmartBits automation tool, the SmartWindow and SmartFlow products.

“These may be [just] enhancements, but they are world-first enhancements and they meet the new requirements in the marketplace,” Fishburn said.