How We Did It

We established three test environments: baseline architecture without the Intel NetStructure 7110, one with a NetStructure 7110 and one with two NetStructure 7110 boxes running in a cascaded configuration.

Our test Web site was typical of an e-commerce site incorporating Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) technology. We installed the most recent version of the Apache Web Server on a Sun Microsystems, 270-MHz UltraSparc 5 workstation which included 256M bytes of RAM, 421M bytes of virtual memory and a 4.3G-byte 5400 rpm disk. We downloaded and configured the latest version of SSL for Apache. We created a test 128-bit certificate and key and imported them to the NetStructure 7110 machines.

We used Silk Performer, an automated load test tool by Segue Software, to generate a significant load on the test site. The load test controller and virtual users were spread across a number of machines running Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 with Service Pack 5 applied. The load test controller ran on a Dell OptiPlex GX1 Pentium III 450-MHz machine with 128M bytes of RAM. Each virtual user agent ran on an Intel Pentium II clone 400-MHz machine with 1G bytes of RAM.

The network consisted of a 3Com SuperStack II 10/100M bit/sec Ethernet hub connected to the Unix-based Apache Server and each Windows NT machine, which were all configured for connectivity at 100M bit/sec.

Prior to load testing, we confirmed that the product's bypass capability worked properly, and made sure the NetStructure 7110 would not prevent Web access in the event of system failure.

For the benchmark, we established a baseline set of performance metrics for the site without the NetStructure 7110 installed on the network. We simulated 50, 100, 200, 400 and 600 concurrent user scenarios interacting with the test site, staging them in groups of 10 at 5-second intervals. One controller machine, running NT 4.0 Terminal Server, managed the kick-off time of the virtual users and collected all the metrics in a Microsoft SQL Server 7 repository. The same scripts and methodology were used for single and dual NetStructure 7110 configurations.

Gray is a software test engineer with SysTest Labs, LLC in Denver. He has more than 11 years professional experience with quality assurance/ quality control project work including requirement development, requirement analysis, test planning, automated test design/ development, database development and application development. In addition, he has five years of experience as a network/system administrator for both PC and Unix environments.

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