Combines Powerful Network Profiling with Re-creation of Actual Network Conditions
Delivering the power of dedicated appliance-based network profiling without the need for an appliance
iTrinegy, Cambridge, UK, Reno, USA, May 2010, — iTrinegy, the Networked Application Performance Lifecycle™ experts, unveil INE Companion Live!, an innovative way of profiling the actual characteristics of an organization’s networks so that an accurate replication of the network and application traffic can be used for software development and testing purposes. It also delivers powerful real-time network reporting and analysis functionality, all supplied within a single Live CD!
INE Companion Live! is a unique adjunct to iTrinegy’s award-winning family of Network Emulators, being designed to gather and analyse real time network characteristics such as bandwidth, latency, loss etc of an organization’s network links. The information it captures is then used to enhance the realism of the simulated environment generated by our range of network emulators. The fact that it is hosted on a Live CD does away with the need for dedicated hardware as INE Companion Live! can temporarily transform a standard 64-bit computer (desktop, laptop, rackmount) or even a virtual machine, into a real-time network profiler. Being highly portable, INE Companion Live! can easily be moved between live and test environments or even sent to remote sites (by download or in the post) to enable remote traffic profiling.
“We’re definitely ahead of the game in helping companies understand what’s going on within their network”. said Frank Puranik, Product Director for iTrinegy. “By condensing our proven INE Companion technology onto a Live CD, we have made it extremely portable and easy to deploy, and since there are no hardware costs involved, it’s very cost effective”. Frank continues “Being able to recreate the actual network activity is a no brainer as it shows how the network is behaving in real life. So, our emulators don’t just emulate a network, with INE companion Live!, they recreate actual networked environments so that the picture is true to life”
Traditionally companies have used SNMP-based information and “Ping” data when looking to gain a picture of the network. INE Companion Live! takes this to another level as it measures the actual flow between a client and server, taking into account the QoS set up of an existing network.
INE Companion Live! profiles the network traffic to extract the network characteristics within the live environment, using this data to create “network scenarios” for use with our iTrinegy Network Emulator family. Furthermore, it offers powerful reporting on traffic flows and response times, together with the reporting facility which captures traffic by address, groups of addresses, applications etc. This can subsequently be used during testing, for troubleshooting and capacity planning. In addition, INE Companion Live! monitors activity in the live network, where a detailed view of current and historical performance across a network is given in a very short period of time.
The data collected by INE Companion Live! is essential in understanding network usage and provides detailed reporting on loss, dropped packets, bandwidth utilisation etc. This allows for base-lining of both the network and applications in order to later reconstruct a very realistic Emulated network environment. In addition to this, its traffic generation, replay and capture features offer the ability to provide load to the emulated environment for greater realism
INE Companion Live! co-exists with ANY operating system installed on any machine; and can be deployed on any hardware platform of choice (rather than propriety hardware) which offers a substantial lower TCO plus overcoming hardware obsolescence. Importantly, it doesn’t overwrite any existing operating system but runs immediately once the Live CD is inserted and the computer ( laptop, desktop, rackmount server or virtual machine) is rebooted. Once finished with, simply close down INE Companion Live!, remove the CD and the host platform reverts back to iys normal state.
INE Companion Live! in conjunction with INE Emulators offers real-time clarity for consolidation projects, virtualisation and cloud computing, disparate networks covering WANs (MPLS) Internets, Mobile 3G/GPRS, Tetra, Satellite etc. and customer environments where control/management is difficult.
Frank concludes, “If you want to understand how your applications will perform on any network then the best way is to test in the most realistic network conditions possible. Not just any network, but a replication of your network, one that’s secure, accurate and repeatable, so no matter what changes need to made over the years, you have the tools to accommodate the changing IT of your organization”.