The economic and technical pressures on enterprises have never been greater. Doing more with less is now business as usual and this mindset extends to the enterprise network. Organizations are expected to support richer services, more traffic and more types of traffic with decreasing budgets for equipment and personnel. Network devices must provide improved performance with ease of management to enable enterprise IT departments to keep up with the demand.

This poses tough questions for manufacturers and enterprises. Can the device or network:

• Support a high quality of experience for sensitive applications such as voice or video?
• Achieve the forwarding rates required by low-latency applications while maintaining throughput?
• Deliver lossless performance under congested conditions?
• Enforce effective security measures while maintaining throughput and latency thresholds?
• Failover properly in the case of a disaster or outage?

For those responsible for creating and delivering the increasingly complex networks in the enterprises of today and tomorrow, the challenges have never been greater. Validating the performance and reliability of the component protocols and functions discretely is no longer a valid predictor of behavior.

You need to know in advance how a device will perform in a real network by testing in a realistic environment, one that reproduces the complexity and scale it will encounter when deployed. Based on its function, a device will need to scale in number of ports, subscribers, sessions, routes, tunnels, VLANs and multi-play traffic while maintaining throughput performance, QoS and security. If your test system can’t deliver this level of realism, you can’t have the assurance that the system will perform in a real network.