aiScaler selects Spirent Blitz.io

Spirent Communications, a leader in testing wireless networks, services and devices, announced today its Spirent Blitz.io cloud-based testing solution was selected by aiScaler for a comparative analysis of its solution with those from two other vendors in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) marketplace: Citrix NetScaler and F5 BIG-IP. aiScaler utilized Blitz.io to perform realistic stress testing of the company’s cloud-based Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) on the AWS marketplace.

ADCs are reverse proxies that accelerate and scale internet traffic while acting as advanced load balancers offer features including caching, DoS protection, SSL offload, health monitoring and mobile content delivery. The ADC market has shifted to the cloud, with these virtual appliances running on services such as Amazon EC and Windows Azure, moving away from traditional hardware-based appliances. aiScaler delivers a virtual all-in-one ADC.

"When selecting a load-testing tool, a cloud based tool was really our only option,” said Milo Muller, director of cloud operations at aiScaler. “Our product is hosted in the cloud, and needed something capable of attacking the ADC's from multiple servers around the world, ensuring a real-world simulation, something that is simply impossible with a local machine. aiScaler tried several cloud-based solutions, but in the end it decided to use Blitz.io for their comparison review with F5 Big IP and Citrix NetScaler. Blitz.io has a web-based GUI that is easy to use, uses proprietary technology to create repeatable test, and creates easy to understand graphs for each test-result. The technology makes the tests more objective and the reporting makes the results perfect for use in a comparison. Both of these points are very important when creating a credible comparison review. We recommend Blitz.io to our clients who are looking for a simple, yet powerful way of ensuring their environment is protected against traffic spikes.”

Developed with expertise gained through Spirent’s 20+ years of experience in the test and measurement market, the tests run on Blitz.io simulate real-world conditions by generating test traffic from multiple servers around the world. Under a load of an increasing number of users, Blitz.io measured response times and server stability data for each solution until failure. These tests were configured in such a way as to mirror a denial of service (DoS) attack. Blitz.io recorded the number of hits each ADC could accept (or fail) under stress.

“Blitz.io placed these ADC’s under really challenging conditions, helping the manufacturers to clearly see error and time-out rates and to understand overall performance,” said Brian Buege, General Manager at Spirent. “It is also exceedingly easy to use and produce powerful graphs which are vital for side-by-side comparisons. We’ve taken the best learnings from our years of experience in test and measurement, put those into the Blitz.io platform and created the benchmark for cloud-based load testing. We’ve brought rock-solid, objective performance testing to the cloud so that companies such as aiScaler can compare their products to the competition without any bias.”

Blitz brings simplicity and agility to performance testing by enabling developers to instantly burst up to 200,000 concurrent users against an app in seconds. Users can also customize their tests by choosing multiple regions around the world for traffic sources and ensure applications deliver the highest levels of user satisfaction.