When NP Does Not Equal Network Processor

BreakingPoint CTO and co-founder Dennis Cox has been working with network processors for a long time and knows their importance for testing tools. Why? As Dennis says in the video interview below, "It's all about performance."

Network processors were not around when legacy network testing tools were created, hence the frustration Dennis (and others) felt using these tools as a vendor. In our discussion, Dennis details why network processors are the only way to achieve realistic network simulation for testing. Starting and ending with performance.

During our discussion I was reminded of Dennis' post "According to my Competition I'm No Longer An Idiot" where he wrote how we doubled the performance of the BreakingPoint Elite from 20 to 40 Gbps of Layer 4-7 app traffic through a firmware upgrade made possible due to our network processor technology.

At the time there were signs from the competition that they had seen the "network processor light" as they had added NP, at least into the product name. However, we haven’t yet seen real evidence that the competition is using real network processors. In the interview we revisit this topic and look at what it means to actually use a network processor and how the acronym "NP" doesn't always equal network processor. We invite the industry to ultimately “show us your boards" because we are going to show you ours, again, as you'll see:

Posted by Kyle Flaherty

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Tags: Data Center Consolidation // DDoS Testing //