Network
Resiliency
A typical mission critical network is comprised of a mesh of
heterogeneous equipment that has to interoperate based on industry
standard specifications. New and more powerful clients, applications,
and wide area uses are stressing networks beyond their intended
design. Many equipment vendors have made their product more
robust with advanced filtering, flow-control, and even policy
based management protocols to keep the network working even
in the event of illegal traffic propagating across the entire
network.
There are many "what ifs" in the area of network
resiliency that an IT manager must be prepared to understand.
How will a broadcast storm affect my overall infrastructure?
Will a device capable of sending jumbo frames bring down my
core switches or backbone routers? Will heavily contended
domains every recover from logarithmic collision conditions?
These and a host of other concerns arise when illegal and
error traffic starts hitting the network.
The powerful traffic generation capabilities of FlameThrower
allow an IT manager to easily generate traffic that is both
valid and invalid and completely control how it gets on the
networks. Setting up a multiple port broadcast storms only
takes moments and through existing management tools the effects
will be seen immediately. These tests can help users create
the most robust networks possible by helping them understand
how their networks would fail in the worst of traffic conditions.
Some of the illegal conditions FlameThrower is capable of
generating include: CRC errors, frame alignment errors, runt
frames,
long frames, invalid collision, invalid broadcast, illegal
IPG, preamble, ICMP ping flooding, SNMP requests, replay of
captured error trace and much more.
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