Case Study: Electronic Measurement Company (Keysight) achieves confident firewall upgrades with Keysight BreakingPoint

Keysight Optimizes Massive Network Security Infrastructure Upgrade

Electronic Measurement Company needed to upgrade next‑generation firewalls across a global network but wanted to avoid the outages and configuration surprises it had experienced in previous rollouts. To validate vendor claims and run realistic pre‑deployment tests, the customer worked with Keysight and used Ixia’s BreakingPoint application and security test solution (with Ixia professional services) to perform a controlled bake‑off that simulated real production traffic and attack mixes.

Keysight ran best‑case, application‑mix, and security‑efficiency tests that revealed clear tradeoffs: Brand‑A exceeded published throughput (~38 Gbps) but only achieved ~1.7M simultaneous sessions versus an 8M datasheet claim, while Brand‑B matched published throughput (30 Gbps) and supported ~35M sessions; Brand‑A’s sandbox catch rate was ~10% higher and reached verdicts about 50% faster. Using Keysight’s BreakingPoint findings, the customer bought both NGFWs and deployed them where each performed best (Brand‑A with full security on the LAN, Brand‑B with reduced features in data centers), preventing production failures and enabling ongoing, data‑driven validation.