Check Point Selects Spirent to Test Security System for Scale and Performance in High-Speed Environments

Spirent Avalanche™ Utilized to Test the Check Point 61000 Security System Using Real World Traffic

Sunnyvale, Calif. – July 10, 2012 – Spirent Communications, the leader in testing networks, services and devices, today announced that Check Point selected Spirent’s security solution to test the performance and scalability of the 61000 Security System. Tested with Spirent Avalanche, the 61000 provides customers with the security and scale needed to meet the most demanding enterprise and service provider needs.

As IT departments accelerate the migration of network resources into the cloud or expand their network infrastructure to support a growing number of enterprise applications and bring your own device (BYOD) scenarios, the performance of next generation firewalls becomes critical. Firewalls need to deliver the high-levels of performance expected of today’s network architectures, while managing the expanded scalability demands of new virtualized and cloud environments.

“The Check Point 61000 security system is a multi-bladed hardware platform for enterprise data centers, telecommunications carriers and cloud service providers. Testing a high performance system that can scale up to 1Tbps of firewall throughput with support for 70 million concurrent connections and 600,000 sessions per second requires an equally high performance testing solution,” said Fred Kost, head of product marketing at Check Point Software Technologies. “Check Point and Spirent have collaborated for several years and testing with Spirent’s solutions has enabled us to validate the highest levels of performance for our security gateways in actual customer environments.”

Spirent Avalanche tested NAT, IPS and logging, and included a mixture of traffic sources such as HTTP, DNS, and SMTP. Spirent Avalanche’s capabilities include security, capacity and performance testing for optimal quality of service (QoS), as well as the insertion of realistic user behaviors so that tests reflect real-world usage. The Avalanche appliance makes real-time statistics available through a reporting tool that provides instant data across all testing protocols.

“With cloud computing, data center environments are becoming massive, so firewalls need to be able to scale effectively, while being able to handle signature-based attacks that are growing in sophistication,” Jeff Schmitz, vice president of product marketing at Spirent Communications. “Spirent’s ability to test performance with realism at scale provides visibility into production network scenarios in the lab with instant feedback. Such testing is especially vital for enterprises and service providers that experience heavy traffic and might be more vulnerable to security issues.”

For more information about the Spirent Avalanche, visit www.spirent.com/Solutions-Directory/Avalanche