Case Study: a large network equipment manufacturer improves VNF benchmarking with Spirent Communications

Large Network Equipment Manufacturer - Customer Case Study

A large network equipment manufacturer, a company with 180,000 employees, faced significant challenges in benchmarking the performance of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). They needed to isolate infrastructure bottlenecks and ensure performance in a shared, virtualized environment, which is inherently more complex than testing traditional dedicated hardware. They partnered with Spirent Communications to address these unique testing requirements.

Spirent implemented a comprehensive white box testing solution using its Spirent TestCenter and Spirent MethodologyCenter products. The solution included testing the virtual environment in isolation, benchmarking the VNF under load, and simulating "noisy neighbor" scenarios with Spirent CloudStress. Key results included discovering that enabling DPDK increased virtual port performance by approximately ten times and that the testing successfully identified performance characteristics and implementation challenges across different OpenStack distributions.