Yahoo! Ensures Resiliency of Network Equipment and Cloud Infrastructure

With one of the world’s largest network and cloud infrastructures, Yahoo! faces unique challenges as it fulfills its vision to be the center of people’s online lives by delivering personally relevant, meaningful Internet experiences.

Challenge

Yahoo!’s traffic volume and application complexity has grown rapidly over the past decade, driving the company to build out a massive network and application infrastructure to support more and more load. The company continues to invest in high-capacity servers, load balancers, routers, and switches, plus massive firewalls. Previously, however, Yahoo!’s security team had no way to stress this enormous infrastructure and measure its resiliency to ensure performance, stability, and security.

Yahoo! needed a solution to validate the performance, functionality, and capacity of its systems under a wide mix of real-world traffic, including video, instant messaging, and Web applications, as well as live security attacks and load from millions of users.

Solution

Yahoo! turned to the BreakingPoint Storm™ to recreate realistic Internet-scale network conditions to validate the performance and security of the company’s network, data center, and application infrastructures. In particular, the security team used the device to:

• Standardize the validation of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI)-based network and security products prior to purchase and prior to deployment.
• Understand in advance how high-performance, content-aware products will perform when faced with Yahoo!’s unique architecture and network conditions.
• Establish a standardized, deterministic, and vendor-neutral method for evaluating the resiliency of network and data center devices using the scientific BreakingPoint Resiliency Score™.
• Simulate real application traffic and user load to produce a series of measurements of server farms on the other end of server load balancers.

Results

By relying on the BreakingPoint Storm to stress its infrastructure with the load of millions of users, Yahoo! is able to:

• Measure and add capacity to withstand peak load by subjecting applications, servers, and network infrastructure to application traffic from millions of users, as well as cyber attacks.
• Improve the return on its IT investments.
• Use thorough and comprehensive protocol fuzzing to probe every possible weakness in the infrastructure.
• Validate defenses against large-scale Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.

Schedule an Evaluation Today

Find out why the world’s largest companies rely on BreakingPoint to measure and harden the resiliency of every component of their network and data center infrastructures, from the chip all the way up to the network and the applications that run across it. Schedule a personalized demo today.