Xena Networks XenaAppliance

The Xena Networks XenaAppliance is a Gigabit TCP test chassis for stateful traffic load testing, analysis and characterisation of Ethernet equipment and network infrastructure. The compact device supports 10 and 1G L4-7 interfaces and can be equipped with 1 or 10G L2-3 test modules.

The product offers end-to-end testing of switches, firewalls, routers, NAT routers, proxies, load-balancers and bandwidth shapers, and is also suitable to characterise entire network infrastructure performance for TCP.

Users can characterise their performance by measuring connection establishment and teardown rates, determining packet forwarding rate at large numbers of connections and identifying performance bottlenecks. The platform is also suitable for rapid validation of performance or regression testing. Developers of TCP-based application servers such as web and FTP servers can measure TCP connection rates and verify robustness against TCP SYN attacks.

Some of the device’s features include: stateful TCP traffic load generation with 4 million TCP connections; high port density in small (2U) form factor; support for dual-speed 1G and 10G SFP optical and copper Ethernet interfaces for L4-7 and L2-3 testing; configuration and tuning of Ethernet, IP and TCP header fields for advanced traffic scenarios; stateful TCP connection blasting; HTTP get/put/head/post blasting; wire-speed traffic capture with programmable filter and trigger criteria; and switched and routed network topologies, TCP proxy and NAT support.

Free traffic generation and analysis software is included (XenaConnect for L4-7 and XenaManager-2G for L2-3), as well as Xena L2-3 test applications (Xena2544, 2889, 1564 and 3918).