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L2/L3 Testing Vendors - Comments? Praise? Horror Stories?

  • From: Tim Irwin
  • Date: Thu Oct 18 10:33:54 2001

Looking for comments/experiences/war stories on testing products, such as
Smartbits, Ixia, Adtech, Agilent, and Ganymede.

Desired functionality:
L2: 10/100/1000 Ethernet, ATM, FR, POS, PPPoX session generation
L2.5: MPLS, MPLS-TE
L3: BGP, OSPF, RSVP, Diff-Serv
L4-7: closed-loop testing (i.e., effects of TCP windowing and other types of
flow control), VoIP, streaming media, etc.

Not entirely happy with current vendors... Smartbits seems ok for L2, but L3
sucks, often too cumbersome to be productive, and I found some descrepancies
and reporting problems with Smartbits, which makes me not want to trust it.
Agilent seems to be good at L3, but lacks L2 testing capabilities.  Ganymede
is good if you want to test application functionality.  Past experience with
Adtech was L2 only.  No clue who makes anything decent to test MPLS,
although I believe Agilent does.

Experience with the current vendor market is that they all have their
strengths, so you really need a mixture of products to do adequate testing.
Just curious if others have similar experiences.  Off-list replies
welcomed...

Thanks,
Tim

--
Tim Irwin, Sr. Engineer
Architecture & Engineering
BellSouth.net, Inc.
e-mail: [email protected]
office: 678.441.7951

"Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to
pause and reflect."  -Mark Twain