Driven by the explosion of media-rich applications, network equipment manufacturers, service providers, and enterprises must achieve high performance and quality of experience (QoE) by fine-tuning their network infrastructures and services.

Application delivery infrastructures must be equipped to sustain large numbers of concurrent sessions, connections, transactions, and tunnels and have the elasticity to meet peak usage. Network deployments often run smoothly with legitimate traffic, but break down when subjected to attacks or stresses from malicious traffic. Technology and service complexity and the sheer load on the network have created a “perfect storm” for test engineers. Read more »

Economic and competitive pressures have led financial enterprises to make business assets and sensitive information accessible through IP networks, which are susceptible to attacks that steal money or affect the delivery of client services. Both can result in serious losses. It used to be that a bank’s assets were as secure as its vault. Today, financial enterprises need a way to protect their assets from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, known vulnerability attacks, encryption attacks, and impersonations. Read more »

In response to the ever growing and changing threat landscape, network security appliances have become more sophisticated and powerful. They incorporate advanced techniques such as deep packet inspection (DPI) and massive parallel processing.

Individual appliances, such as firewalls, IDS/IPS, anti-virus, anti-spam and data loss prevention systems, have given way to modern universal threat management (UTM) systems. UTM systems come in all sizes: from small desktop units, to rack-mounted, multi-unit, multi-10 Gigabit systems. Witness the 160 Gbps demonstration of SonicWALL’sSuperMassive E10000 system at RSA, incidentally tested with Ixia appliances. Read more »