Antara - Real Testing, Application Level Network Test Solutions

FlameThrower in Action

ANTARA.net invented the first appliances to test and stress content delivery networks and applications over three years ago.
Our easy-to-use solutions provide users with a consolidated means of understanding how next generation networks will affect their applications and business. Information Assurance comes with knowledge and ANTARA.net's affordable family of network validation and stressing solutions provide the answers.

In use by over 200 customers in a variety of industries including: network equipment vendors, insurance, finance, commercial and government agencies. ANTARA.net solutions provide the most robust set of features and protocol support for today's demanding network infrastructure test and validation needs.

* The Internet in a Box
* Server Validation
* The Application
* Protocol Coverage
* SSL
* Virtualization Testing
* IPv6
* Content Delivery Devices

The Internet in a box
ANTARA.net FlameThrower families of network validation solutions provide the framework of making proactive network management a reality. Stressing all aspects of security and content delivery with powerful user emulation for HTTP, SSL, FTP,
email, streaming, LANs, IPv6, cyber attacks and more. Replacing 10s or even 100s of test PCs with a single portable chassis gives you a new and more cost effective way of network pre-deployment verification and optimization, allowing you to get the most out of your network infrastructure investments.

Repeatability is an aspect of testing that is crucial. FlameThrower provides a test platform that repeats test iterations with ultimate precision so you can be assured that any changes or optimization you make to the network or devices being tested are reflected accurately. Using multiple PC or test devices not designed with this in mind will give you erratic results. Also, with our exclusive sequencer function you can point and click your way to advanced testing without the need for extensive scripting input.

Upon test Execution FlameThrower allows you to easily interpret results. From real-time micro statistics to rolled-up automatically generated reports you have the choice to see test metrics the way you want to.

Server Validation
Servers come in all shapes, sizes and capacities. The newer blade server solutions provide levels of consolidation and scalability that is difficult to achieve with the conventional rack mounted variety. In any case deploying and optimizing the correct servers for your network applications is imperative for success. Understanding how servers perform from a general perspective will allow you to deploy the right amount of equipment for the application at hand.

FlameThrower has the ability to create 2,000,000 emulated users connecting and running tens of thousands of multi-protocol activities per second against a server. This type of testing will show you specifically the top end of server capacity and at what point(s) specific failures occur. Security

Attacks on the vulnerabilities of network infrastructures are on the rise. Not only are hackers trying to block access to sites via denial of service attacks; they are also aggressively taking advantage of known vulnerabilities to break into sensitive business infrastructures. The advent of intrusion detection and protection solutions is an attempt to plug the holes. Tools that help test IDS are available to showcase how they see specific known attacks. Unfortunately these tests are typically done under no load conditions, thus the IDS can easily see any attack being delivered.
When under real world load many IDS solutions cannot keep up with inspecting the good traffic from the bad, thus attacks get through or many false alarms are indicated, causing damage and undo efforts to analyze actual attacks from ordinary traffic.

With FlameThrower, IDS solutions can be put to the real test by creating typical and non-typical user load scenarios along side attack signature generators. FlameThrower can also mix in actual denial of service attack load that will show case the ability of IDS and Firewall solutions to filter such attacks. This will give you the information needed for optimized deployment and configuration of increasingly complex intrusion protection and other advanced security solutions.

The Application
An application is no good to users and businesses if the infrastructure it is placed on cannot meet the needs of information access and assurance. Many application processes that used to reside as server or OS functions are now being relegated to more intelligent devices in the network plumbing. SSL acceleration, network caching, content switching, stateful packet inspection and other technologies are being deployed for better performance and deployment of more traffic intensive applications.

By creating emulated users that look to the network as real users connecting, accessing and retrieving information and recreating other real-world transactions. FlameThrower can baseline content delivery networks before any application is even deployed. FlameThrower is the only solution to emulate both the clients and servers from a single appliance. This Consolidation of functionality makes it extremely easy to bring up end-to-end stress tests, or tests that isolate parts of the infrastructure to determine thresholds and potential failure points.

As an integrated function in Mercury Interactive's® LoadRunner® Application testing software the two solutions work hand in hand determining performance and capacity profiles of the network and the back-end applications.
No other solutions available provide this range of test and measurement coverage!

Protocol Coverage
Web based traffic accounts for the majority of an infrastructure's external or public presence and is an ever increasing aspect of internal network applications traffic flows. HTTP, secure transactions via SSL, FTP, streaming media, email and others take on the role of the majority of content delivery. How does your infrastructure handle thousands or tens of thousands of users connecting, disconnecting, retrieving content, and other activities?
This constant ebbing and flowing of user transactions needs to be understood not only in production environments but also during pre-deployment or device validation. Web sites rely heavily on new network devices to ease traffic congestion and improve security.

FlameThrower provides the ability to create users coming into you site from over 2,000,000 host IP addresses emanating from many network subnets. Adding complete HTTP header control, user think times, cookies and other support allows FlameThrower to create the most realistic portrayal of actual user activity and behavior. Now you can ensure timely and accurate delivery of information.

SSL
The browser lock is on more and more often. When applications rely on SSL to perform sensitive business transactions or even
VPN like connectivity server and network capacity and performance can degrade substantially.
The shear computing power needed to setup and maintain encrypted communications is staggering. Next generation SSL acceleration technologies have become available to off load the initial handshake between clients and severs as well as the bulk encryption of data flows. Understanding the true benefit of these complex solutions can be difficult. Manufactures specifications
on SSL accelerators continue to increase but the reality is these numbers are usually based on unrealistic tests or pure extrapolation.

FlameThrower is the fastest SSL testing solution available today. With the ability to create over 4000 non-resumptive SSL connections per/second per chassis and achieve high bulk encryption throughput, you can quickly discern which SSL acceleration technology will meet your demanding application needs.

Virtualization Testing
Many new devices being deployed in data centers are taking advantage of increased CPU power and ASIC technologies to deploy more functionality into IP services. In a single modular chassis we are beginning to see virtualized network components such as Firewalls, Routers, VPN gateways, Server Load Balancers and other functions that can be created via the click of a mouse from the device's management console. Typically the way these devices send traffic to specific virtualized devices is via VLAN tagging on incoming packets. In essence specific virtualized devices will handle all traffic and users on a specific VLAN. This type of deployment is particularly useful in larger data centers and IP provisioning environments negating the need for mass amounts of discrete networking devices.

With the ability to uniquely set the VLAN for specific segments of emulated user traffic, FlameThrower can effectively create intense load on virtualized network infrastructures. A simple configuration option within a test allows FlameThrower to immediately target virtualized environments with realistic user traffic in the same way it would test and stress a traditional network environment. No other test appliance offers this level of flexibility.

IPv6
The world of TCP/IP is running out of numbers. With IP based devices being deployed as handheld and even consumer appliances the scheme of 32-bit addressing is being pushed beyond it intended design. NAT and other proxy implantations to get around the
lack of address space are only short-term bandages. IPv6 provides 128-bit addressing which allows over a trillion IP addresses for global use. The transition from IPv4 TO IPv6 will not be an overnight occurrence; there will be an extended migration from current IPv4 technologies that must coexist with newer IPv6 deployments. IPv6 also brings many new capabilities, as well as problems,
that network operations managers need to become accustomed too.

As an initial entree into the world of IPv6, FlameThrower provides the means of emulating clients and servers doing mass loads of IPv6 HTTP transactions. The unique ability of FlameThrower to offer each test port as an independent test agent allows the mixture of IPv6 and traditional IPv4 traffic to hit the same network. As you look to the next generation of IP, FlameThrower is there to help
you understand the net affect of what will be an industry wide transition.

Content Delivery Devices
FlameThrower is such a powerful stressing solution that even the most advanced content delivery gear can be put to the ultimate test. Although the intent is not to break every thing FlameThrower tests but to understand how and where devices fail. This is extremely important for both the validation and configuration of content aware networking devices.

When deploying Server Load Balancing solutions it is imperative to know how load is being distributed and is it meeting the needs of your bandwidth requirements. FlameThrower is able to "see" through virtual IP addresses of Server Load Balancers showing you both in real server and emulated server environments how your load distribution polices are working, or not is many cases.

Caching and other intermediary content delivery solutions can be tested for their ability to handle surges of TCP connectivity without impacting the back-end servers or applications, while still keeping up with content requests.
Traffic Shaping devices rely on polices and thresholds to make changes to traffic flows. FlameThrower showcases these policies and functions within content aware devices by allowing users to test from the user connectivity level to the application level.

In more complex environments fault tolerant data paths are established to ensure 100% uptime in case of failure.
In these environments how do you know that the relay will switch in case of massive failure? FlameThrower can quickly create the scenario to cause fault or engage the fault tolerant policies, thus allowing you to see the effectiveness of the failsafe infrastructure.

The above are just a few of the many applications and benefits that FlameThrower provides.
As a growing solution ever more capability, capacity and protocol support is being added to ensure that FlameThrower will meet your current and long term needs for ongoing network infrastructure assurance.