ACADEMIA

Spirent Communications announced that HP used Spirent TestCenter and Spirent Avalanche to validate that HP's branch and campus routers deliver superior performance for cloud, rich media and enterprise applications. At HP Discover 2012, June 4-7 in Las Vegas, HP (booth located in Converged Infrastructure Zone) will use the Spirent test solutions to demonstrate performance of the HP 6608 campus router.

The growth in cloud-based services, including rich media and enterprise applications, coupled with a growing remote workforce, requires the network to be designed for high performance and availability that enables rapid network recovery. HP used Spirent solutions to test its routers' capability to offer enterprise users the same Quality of Experience (QoE) regardless of location.

"Today's networks are ill equipped to handle the traffic growth from mobility, bring your own device initiatives and bandwidth intensive rich media applications, like web conferencing," said Sam Rastogi, global product marketing manager, Networking, HP. "HP's tested and validated routers provide performance that is more than four times that of the competition, while also delivering scalability that meets network demands anywhere, anytime."

Spirent TestCenter along with Spirent Avalanche tested that the HP 6608 router delivered key performance metrics such as 108 million packets per second (Mpps) forwarding performance, 60 Gbps firewall, 340,000 TCP connections/sec, 20,000 Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE)tunnels, and fast convergence. This translates to tens of thousands of users across multiple branch offices simultaneously accessing applications, cloud and rich media sessions. Spirent also tested routing and service performance of the HP MSR50 Series router. Testing showed that the HP MSR50 Series delivered 1280 thousand packets per second (Kpps) forwarding performance and 2 Gbps of routing, firewall, network address translation (NAT), and quality of service (QoS) traffic.

"Spirent TestCenter is the ideal solution to demonstrate HP's campus core and branch router metrics because we test performance at scale with real traffic," said Spirent's senior product marketing manager Rajesh Rajamani. "For HP's large multi-location clients, the challenge is to provide connectivity across multiple branch offices, with functionality such as dual-stack IPv4 and IPv6 routing, QoS, security, and tunneling. We thoroughly test the router's performance as it scales to support various types of traffic to ensure the network elements will be able to match real-world demand.