BreakingPoint Systems' core product offering is targeted to Network Equipment Manufacturers (NEMs) and/or Service Providers, and provides to them the ability to automatically and systematically generate network traffic that can then be used to bombard networking and/or security gear. The generated/simulated traffic can additionally be interjected with traffic that exploits known security vulnerabilities, in an attempt to test the target network gear both for overall performance and responsiveness to the traffic, as well as the ability (in security-related gear) to detect the malicious traffic and handle it properly. A full API--which can be accessed via Tcl scripts--can be utilized for custom platform control and test automation.

Three primary products are offered by the vendor, all of which are managed via a Flash-based GUI.

The 4U BreakingPoint Elite box supports up to 2 interface cards (four port 10 Gig/XFP and eight port 1 Gig/SFP cards are available) and boasts traffic generation capabilities at a clip of up to 20 Gb/sec for Layer 4-7 and up to 80 Gb/sec for Layer 2-3 traffic. Up to 15 million concurrent TCP sessions are supported at a rate of 1.5 million TCP sessions per second; and multiple Elite systems can be managed as one to generate aggregate traffic at up to 200 Gb/sec Layer 4-7 or 800 Gb/sec over Layer 2-3.

The BreakingPoint BPS 10K device includes four fiber 10 Gig Ethernet ports and is capable of producing 10 Gig of application layer traffic generation (up to 750,000 TCP requests per second) over up to 7,500,000 simultaneous TCP sessions; while the lighter BreakingPoint BPS 1K boasts four copper/fiber Gig Ethernet ports and is capable of producing 4 Gig of application layer traffic generation (up to 500,000 TCP requests per second) over up to 5,000,000 simultaneous TCP sessions. Both of the BPS boxes are 3U.

Test wise, the vendor notes that the platform natively (out-of-the-box) understands and can generate Layer 2-7 traffic over better than 60 protocols, including HTTP/S, POP3, instant messaging, DNS, SIP, SNMP, Oracle, BitTorrent (now including encrypted BitTorrent), LDAP, and more. In addition, better than 3,600 "Live Security Strikes," which replicate known security vulnerabilities, can be infused within the traffic; with the strikes employing evasion techniques (in an attempt to bypass the security filters of the device under test) such as stream segmentation, packet fragmentation, URL obfuscation and more. The vendor states that new applications and strikes are released as often as weekly; and additionally offer an AppExpress service for the development of test packages for custom applications (that can be delivered to customers as quickly as overnight), as well as a Custom Application Protocol Toolkit that allows customers to build protocols for their own proprietary apps.

Other features of the platform include the ability to capture and replay live traffic, the ability to save and reuse transactions across tests, an included library consisting of "hundreds" of pre-configured tests (as well as the ability to define custom tests), and a reporting engine that produces test details and charts with export abilities to PDF, RTF, XLS, CSV, and HTML formats.

Visit the vendor's Web site for further information.