During the week of Network Field Day 6, Spirent announced the Avalanche NEXT product line. Our first NFD6 session was at Spirent’s office in Sunnyvale.
Last time I used Spirent products (admittedly about 10 years ago), the interface was a complex, clunky Windows application. You had to hand-craft frames that would have (at best) a very predictable value iteration in various packet fields (increase a payload field by “1” or “2” per packet). Frankly, this didn’t work well. TCP sessions didn’t work at all, and simulating more than a couple flows simultaneously was so time-consuming that it had no value. You could test raw throughput, but nothing (helpful) above layer 3.
While I realize that Spirent’s products have evolved in the interceding decade, the introduction of the Avalanche NEXT brings a lot of changes.
Herding Packets 