Partners tackle security test
Staff -- Test & Measurement World, 9/1/2003
Network equipment manufacturer Spirent Communications (Calabasas, CA; http://www.spirentcom.com) and security processing vendor Cavium Networks (Santa Clara, CA; http://www.cavium.com) have join forces to develop test instruments for network security performance analysis. Spirent will be adding Cavium's NITROX security co-processors to its Avalanche and TeraVPN product lines in order to boost performance when testing networks for secure traffic loading conditions.
Cavium's security co-processors accelerate the encryption operations used in applications such as virtual private networks (VPN) over the public Internet. In VPN applications, the payload of an IP packet is encrypted using a private key negotiated between the two communicating nodes. Because encryption is a math-intensive function, it slows down packet handling when performed by a conventional RISC processor. The presence of a co-processor can thus increase the packet-handling capability of a network line card. NITROX devices can handle network data rates as fast as 10 Gbits/s.
Spirent's products are designed to generate heavy network traffic loads for testing the capacity and load response of network devices. Avalanche can generate in excess of 30,000 HTTP requests/s and supports a variety of protocols and streaming media transactions. TeraVPN simulates the loading caused by the establishment of VPN links to help developers and service providers measure the impact of imposing data security on network transactions.
The partnership will allow Spirent to upgrade the performance of its instruments to ensure that network developers will be able to fully load-test their next-generation designs.
