Midnight Networks (Waltham, MA) released Avalanche/Web, a Web
testing unit with very high performance, capable of emulating thousands of
clients simultaneously.
It produces what the vendor calls a “realistic emulation
of the Internet,” enabling ISPs, server vendors and telcos to test the
Internet
performance of their HTTP/FTP servers and services.
“The Avalanche/Web
product will be popular with providers who offer web server hosting
services,” said Eric Zines, VPN Analyst with TeleChoice. “Understanding the
performance characteristics of web servers in real-life
circumstances will allow service providers to scale their offerings to match
customer needs. Without benchmarking and testing, there is no accurate way
to do this. Also, this type of benchmarking will allow them to design Service
Level Agreements for web hosting services, and offer these SLAs with
confidence.”
The key feature of Avalanche/Web is its ability to emulate 1500 clients with
multiple IP addresses from each hardware unit. Systems may be linked
together to provide many more clients. Avalanche/Web can determine how
many “hits” a web site can take in a day, hour, minute or second. By stress
testing a site it can also determine the robustness of the web or FTP server
which is hosting it.
A preliminary version of Avalanche/Web is now available, a base system
consisting of a 200 MHz Intel Pentium-based platform with two 10/100 Mb
Ethernet ports and the vendor’s proprietary performance and stress testing
software. The price of a base system is $39,995.