David Newman's lab

Lab overview: Network Test offers benchmarking services for a wide variety of networking equipment and services. For nearly a decade, we have conducted performance and security assessments of routers, switches, firewalls, VPN gateways, intrusion detection systems, SAN gear, and wireless equipment.

Our clients fall into four categories:

• Large enterprises
  
• Service providers
  
• Trade publications
  
• Industry consortiums

Unlike most other commercial test labs, we do not accept private testing commissions from equipment vendors or service providers. Our primary loyalty is to end-users, not to the marketing aims of any given vendor or provider.

Equipment in the lab:

• Spirent SmartBits analyzers for 10, 100, gigabit, and 10-gigabit Ethernet and OC-12 and OC-48 POS
  
• Spirent AX-4000 for gigabit Ethernet and OC-3/OC-12 POS
  
• Caw WebAvalanche and WebReflector for HTTP, SSL, and streaming media generation
  
• The Measurement Factory Web Polygraph for proxy cache testing
  
• NetIQ Chariot for application-layer testing
  
• Intel and Sparc-based servers and clients

We also custom-develop test scripts and software as needed.

Software in the lab: We are primarily a Linux and Windows shop. We also have a few machines running FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Solaris.

Expanded lab capabilities:
We offer software development in C, C++, Perl, SQL, and Visual Basic. Also, through an informal partnership with Spirent Communications, we can perform tests in Spirent Smartlab for situations where our own 1,200-square-foot facility is not large enough.

Network Connections: Most of our projects are lab-based and within the lab, we offer connectivity at rates of up to 10 Gbit/s. We buy high-speed wide-area connectivity as needed on a per-project basis.

Lab specific URLs:

• www.networktest.com -- links to past and present test results, methodologies, and even some of the scripts we use.

Please contact sales@networktest.com if we may be of assistance.

Back to Newman's bio and recent articles

Apply for your free subscription to Network World. Click here. Or get Network World delivered in PDF each week.

Request a reprint or permission to use this article.