Network Emulators Reduce Costs and Increase Revenues

Applications have become a critical component of our daily work and personal lives. From office productivity software to mobile and other consumer applications that enrich our lives, we have become increasingly dependent on their on-demand availability. Creating and deploying a robust application architecture requires extensive planning and testing.

This holds especially true for networked applications. Today's businesses depend on their availability and performance. Failures, dropped sessions, or overall poor performance will severely impact business operations, affecting employee productivity and even corporate revenues.

The emergence of cloud-based apps further complicates matters. The only way to truly understand how an application will perform when deployed over a live production network is to test it with realistic traffic and against real-world network conditions -- using a network emulator. Proper testing with a network emulator can easily make the difference between a successful product rollout and a costly product failure.

Only with a network emulator can you replicate real-world LAN/WAN conditions and validate how your application will perform when deployed.

VirtualNet accurately and precisely emulates real-world network conditions. It is an in-line network emulator that can be configured to replicate or emulate the LAN/WAN conditions in deployed networks and enables verification/optimization of Networked Applications (e.g. Databases, Client/Server architecture based Software and services running over a WAN).

As shown in the figure below, the VirtualNet network emulator can be easily added to any existing test infrastructure to provide realistic performance results and reveal hidden or hard to reproduce issues that may only become evident when the application is exercised over a production network. Pre-deployment testing with VirtualNet can greatly improve testing thoroughness, shorten development schedules, and eliminate costly post-deployment issues such as extensive troubleshooting and downtime.

VirtualNet network emulators enable the development or verification engineer to vary network parameters such as Latency (Delay), Bandwidth Restrictions, Packet Drop, Packet Reorder/Duplication and Corruption individually to characterize and isolate the application sensitivity to individual parameters or collectively to create a realistic production environment.

Some of the key uses of network emulators in Application development and testing include:

Development and Verification/Optimization. Test the Application's:

Resiliency to frame loss and variable network latency
Response to lost connections
Ability to detect data errors and/or maintain security
Bandwidth utilization and its suitability for the production network

Pre-Deployment Application Performance Testing. Evaluate:

Application performance/user experience at remote sites through bandwidth limitations, latency and frame loss
SW/HW products for optimizing price/performance ratios
Redundant network (fail-over) operation
Evaluation of WAN Acceleration solutions to improve application performance.
Determination of optimum Network SLAs

Pre-Deployment Application Performance Testing. Evaluate:

Network vs. Application issues can be quickly resolved by accurately replicating network condition in a controlled lab environment
Root cause analysis can be easily performed by creating specific impairments in a repeatable manner
Remediation solutions can be tested prior to full deployment

VirtualNet GE - 1G Ethernet Network Emulator

VirtualNet XG - 10G Ethernet Network Emulator

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