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As you know from Dennis’ earlier blog post, BreakingPoint is deep into our development of LTE support and reporting our progress right here for all of you. The first element for LTE we are implementing is SCTP support and I’m happy to say that I’m the one working on this part of the project. I wanted to take a moment to update you on our rapid progress.

Today, we have released the first Application & Threat Intelligence (ATI) Update for our 2.0 operating system, number 66898. This update not only provides several new features, but also adds thirty new security strikes and three new application protocols. Additionally we have provided some overall enhancements to both our security and application protocol coverage. This ATI Update is available automatically for all BreakingPoint Storm CTM customers under maintenance. Let me provide some more information on some of these new features, applications and security strikes.

If you are a regular user of the BreakingPoint Storm CTM™ you know how to quickly add Components to a simulation such as Application Simulator, Client Simulator or Security, and hit "run". Additionally, I encourage our customers to add useful names and descriptions to each of these Components and to the overall test. The reason? This information and unique identifiers are used in the reports tool, so when you give the report to your manager, or look at it a few weeks later, you can quickly discern what you were trying to accomplish. This topic seemed like a really good one to address in my first blog post and I wanted to take you through, step-by-step, some easy ways for you to accomplish this task.

Several BreakingPoint engineers are starting work on adding Long-Term Evolution (LTE) support for the BreakingPoint Storm CTM. I’m excited about this development, as well as the way in which we are going to share the news. Rather than have you wait for a press release with a long list of our new LTE-based features, we are going to use this blog to bring you along for the rapid development ride. Over the next few weeks you will hear directly from BreakingPoint engineers and myself about lessons learned in LTE network simulation and performance. These posts will provide you with a look inside our development team and grant you visibility into the evolution of our product, nearly in real-time. Let's get started.

A few weeks ago I provided a link to the network security survey we were doing with SANS. The survey is now closed and the results are currently being analyzed by the SANS analyst for the in-depth research paper. We will be announcing many of the findings during a webcast on July 22nd that is now open for registration. The webcast will feature three renowned network security experts; BreakingPoint CTO Dennis Cox, David Rice, senior SANS instructor and James Tarala of Enclave Consulting.

Those aren’t my pearls of wisdom but the words of Leonardo da Vinci, who knew in the 15th century that removing complexity unveils the greatest opportunities. Our 10th record quarter of growth just ended, a testament to the powers of simplifying what was once an overly complex, brittle, and difficult-to-maintain process. Now we’re turning our sights toward simplifying the migration to Long-Term Evolution or LTE, the next-generation network for mobile telephony.

Our industry is constantly releasing survey data on different trends. Just today as I was sorting through my news feeds I came across three interesting studies just out:

Today we are sharing a bit of news, the release of the BreakingPoint Server Load Resiliency Methodology. Faithful readers of this blog know we have had many conversations on properly validating the performance and stability of a network infrastructure with real-world applications, live security attacks and high-stress load. We all recognize that stressing our network infrastructure goes beyond routers, switches, and firewalls, to include web and application servers. Understanding how resilient your data center or even cloud infrastructure is to high-stress traffic and attack requires the ability to simulate user behavior and load at incredibly high-performance and throughput levels.