Hammer Edge™
The next generation of testing for IP communications
Hammer Edge™ enables Network Equipment Manufacturers, Service Providers, and large Enterprises to understand the affect of normal and harmful data traffic on their real-time services of voice and video in unsecure and secure scenarios. By emulating realistic user behavior and predicting the realistic user experience of pre-deployed multiservice networks and services in a very simple and effective manner, Hammer Edge™ improves test productivity, time-to-market as well as revenue.
Hammer Edge™ thereby also reduces the risk of SLA penalties. Hammer Edge™ is designed to deliver extremely high scale session based traffic for testing Layers 4 – 7 of the OSI stack. The target devices for testing are DPI, IPS/IDS, Firewalls, Network Border Elements, as well as NGN and IMS network equipment, networks and services. Hammer Edge™ emulates real video, voice and data clients as well as servers. By focusing on emulating realistic sessions, Hammer Edge™ provides not only packet based statistics, but also reports on session level errors and re-transmissions that impact system QoS.
Testing Scalability
As advanced networks for Voice, Video and Data continue to converge, testing is becoming an increasingly complex task. Further complicating the task is the increasing scale of the networks and equipment that need to be tested. In the past, testing these complex scenarios focused on functionality as vendors and carriers worked to get them successfully integrated into existing networks. Now that networks are scaling upwards, IP testing, network testing and more all need to emphasize capacity and performance.
For example, some carrier class network border elements and Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) devices now support hundreds of thousands of voice or video sessions on a single chassis. Testing the limits of such devices requires generating multiples of the device’s capacity.
Realistic behavior
Advanced network devices such as network border elements, DPI systems, Traffic Shapers, Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS)/Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS), and some Firewalls are state aware and cannot be accurately tested using a packet blaster or traffic replay device. While these unsophisticated, stateless tools may be able to generate enough traffic to fill the device’s interface they will not be able to accurately model realistic device and user behavior. This flaw yields inadequate test coverage and a false sense of product performance. Therefore, testing these sophisticated and intelligent devices requires a more sophisticated, intelligent, and high performance realistic behavior emulation tool.
With its test harness integration capability Hammer Edge™ enables simple and effective network test automation as well as regression testing. Hammer Edge™ meets the test needs of product development, QA, performance test, and customer demo organizations as well as service provider labs as a cost effective, scalable tool that is multi-user and easy to use. Hammer Edge™ is powerful enough to exercise large scale test lab networks and provides reports detailed enough for isolation testing of individual pieces of equipment. Hammer Edge™ also offers flexible reporting that can be customized to generate user defined graphs, charts, and pass/fail criteria — all of which can be exported to standard file formats.
Emulating realistic user behavior assures highest quality user experience
Hammer Edge™ is a sophisticated and advanced next generation multi-service network test system that emulates realistic behavior of users, devices in secure and unsecure network topologies, and predicts user experience within these realistic scenarios. Based on patent-pending rUB/E™ technology, Hammer Edge™ is the first and only product in its class to deliver the following functionality — all at high capacity:- Emulate realistic behavior (versus real traffic generation) of users, devices and network topology configurations
- Test realistic security scenarios
- Predict user experience of data, video and voice as an aggregate (versus individual tests)
As a result, Hammer Edge™ grants network equipment manufacturers, service providers and large enterprises the ability to understand the affect of normal and harmful data traffic on their real-time services of voice and video in both secure and unsecure scenarios — ultimately enabling these organizations to optimize their products and services for the way IP communications work today.
| Feature | Which means organizations can... |
|
Emulate realistic IP: - Network topologies - Device dehavior - User behavior |
... improve their IP testing productivity and better understand how their IP device or network under test performs with various types of realistic behavior in context of multiple scenarios, and enables them to fine-tune their product and reach desired performance and quality goals before it is placed into operational status. |
| Emulates millions of IP users on a single chassis with high performance and realistic testing of multiservice scenarios | ... determine how their IP device or network will meet requirements and agreements within the context of realistic behavior in a controlled manner at deployment capacities before their product goes operational. |
| Emulate hundreds of thousands of secure devices in a realistic way | ... test and verify security subsystems in the context of realistic behavior and validate they comply with security requirements and agreements before going live. |
| Provides metrics, indicators, and scores | ... diagnose problems in a system under test more efficiently and effectively, and predict user experience within realistic scenarios. |
| Command Line Interface for scripting and test harness integration | ... incorporate Hammer Edge™ into existing test plans and automation environments. |
| Easy to use | ... easily configure realistic network topology scenarios and reduce the learning curve for their network and test engineers to predict and plan for a positive user experience. |
