Every type of content imaginable, from mail, to tweets, to virtual reality, and more is now carried on the network. Shopping, live concerts, telecommuting, phone calls, and file transfers all traverse the network with varying degrees of quality.

For those responsible for creating and deploying these highly complex networks, the challenges are clear. Will your solution:

• Scale to meet the demand of peak traffic times for response-time-sensitive applications?
• Maintain user quality of experience (QoE) for high-bandwidth, drop- and delay-sensitive applications?
• Provide the performance and scalability required to support real users generating real traffic over a real network?

Schedule delays and performance problems discovered after deployment can cost you money and customers. In this kind of environment, everything can affect everything else. Validating each application individually will not predict how they will perform once deployed. The test bed must reproduce the complexity and scale of the production network.

Your solution must scale, whether in bandwidth or traffic type or number of transactions, real users, sessions, ports, tunnels or VLANs, full business transactions, while maintaining throughput, 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.