Data centers that use virtual architectures require extremely intelligent, dynamic load balancing infrastructure to handle the enormous volume of concurrent sessions: Google’s reportedly clocks in at 300 million hits per day. Today’s top-end application delivery controllers (ADC) offload many computationally-intensive processes from servers, allowing data center operators to simplify their infrastructure and reduce maintenance costs. But add the processing complexities of managing high volumes of SSL sessions to ever-increasing bandwidth requirements, and the demands made on today’s ADCs become staggering. The manufacturers of these devices, and the data center operators that deploy them, must test thoroughly to validate capacity and interoperability. Service outages can be incredibly costly – both in terms of revenue loss and brand damage.
Just one example of the havoc that a data center outage can wreak is the outage Amazon experienced last month. Described as a cloud problem and network outage, it brought down several of its sites for an extended period. Some of the websites that were affected included popular sites like Reddit.com,Quora.com, GroupMe.com and Foursquare. Some sites went down completely, while others experienced smaller issues.
The software-based load balancers of old have evolved into highly sophisticated hardware devices, with built-in support for SSL offloading and application traffic rate shaping. To test these ADCs under real-world conditions requires a test solution that can generate ultra-high volumes of stateful application traffic, and ultra-high volumes of SSL connections. To make sure that high priority traffic is prioritized under load, testers must pummel the ADC beyond its limits with hundreds of thousands of concurrent sessions and measure service quality throughout those traffic spikes. To ensure that SSL offloading is working as designed, testers must apply huge volumes of encrypted sessions, checking that CPU-intensive encryption and decryption are not hindering the device’s application delivery performance.
To find out more about ultra-high application performance testing, visit Ixia at Interop in booth #1367 for a demonstration of two Ixia Xcellon-Ultra XT80s paired with an F5 Networks VIPRION Application Delivery Controller. The Xcellon-Ultra XT80 appliance delivers the industry’s highest performance and most scalable application traffic. It emulates clients and servers, surrounding the ADC and providing a comprehensive multiplay test solution that is optimized for ultra-high application performance of up to 80 Gbps of line-rate application traffic on 8-10GE ports.
