IPv6 Dual-Stack Testing: Ensure Compliance and Resiliency

Validate compliance, performance, security, and stability of IT infrastructures handling dual-stack IPv6/IPv4 traffic

 

The introduction of IPv6 has greatly expanded the capacity of the Internet, but it has also created countless integration and testing headaches for service providers, major enterprises, and other operators of large networks. These organizations must validate that their IT infrastructures can support dual-stack IPv4/IPv6 traffic while maintaining high performance, security, and stability.

IPv6 Performance and Security Testing Challenges

The move to IPv6 is made more difficult because IPv6 continues to evolve while it proliferates. With IPv6, there are many unknowns when it comes to the functionality and performance of individual devices and entire infrastructures. This puts pressure on organizations to:

• Understand throughput, connection rate, and concurrent session capacity of today’s IPv6 devices, which often underperform IPv4 devices.
• Validate the ability of firewalls, IPS devices, and other security equipment to stop threats in IPv6 as effectively as in IPv4.
• Uncover interoperability issues among devices from different vendors.
• Ensure that technologies such as network address translation (NAT) that bridge the gap between IPv4 and IPv6 do not impede infrastructure resiliency.

BreakingPoint IPv6 Testing Solution

BreakingPoint solves these problems with products that enable organizations to test the performance, security, and stability of IPv6 devices and systems under real-world conditions. The flexible design of every BreakingPoint CTM gives users native support for dual-stack IPv4/IPv6 testing, dramatically improving test effectiveness.

BreakingPoint products are driven by a patented network-processor architecture, allowing organizations to validate dual-stack infrastructures quickly and accurately before deployment. BreakingPoint allows users to:

• Test IPv6 devices under authentic conditions, creating real-world traffic mixes drawn from more than 150 application protocols and more than 30,000 security attacks.
• Validate devices that handle IPv4 and IPv6 traffic concurrently under extreme user load.
• Scale and harden carrier-grade NAT infrastructures used by service providers.