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@byrneit.net> wrote:
For independent testing, Kevin Tolly's been at it a long time, and has shown himself to be fair.
-----Original Message----- From: Sean Hafeez [mailto:sah.list@gmail.com] Sent: Friday, July 18, 2008 2:07 PM To: Frank P. Troy Cc: rpapneja@isocore.com; nanog@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@isocore.com].
Regards, Frank
------------------------------------ Frank P. Troy 703-396-8700 frank@troy-networks.com -------------------------------------
-----Original Message----- From: Brian Knoll (TT) [mailto:Brian.Knoll@tradingtechnologies.com] Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2008 11:16 AM To: nanog@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