Press Release
iTrinegy Releases a New Product - INE Companion
A Fusion of Two Major Technologies: Combines Powerful Network Analysis with Capture/Replay of Real-Time Network Conditions
Cambridge, UK, and Reno, Nevada, USA, February 28th 2008, — iTrinegy, the Networked Application Performance Lifecycle™ experts, are pleased to announce the release of INE Companion, an appliance representing a fusion of two technologies that dramatically enhance the ability to create accurate replications of live networks including competing traffic, losses etc, INE Companion takes application testing using network emulation technology to the next level and demonstrates iTrinegy’s commitment to be the most innovative vendor in the network simulation sector
Base-Lining the Production Network
While all emulators are perfectly capable of creating standard network conditions such as bandwidth, latency, packet drop etc. this is only part of the picture. In real networks, there will be a lot of traffic and other network activity and INE Companion’s powerful reporting capability enables comprehensive visibility and analysis of the ‘Live’ network in order to provide greater clarification and understanding of how the applications perform and utilize the network.
By using INE Companion to monitor activity in the live network, network specialists, testers, and developers will be able to view current and historical performance of their applications across the WAN. The data collected is essential in understanding network usage and provides detailed reporting on errors, dropped packets, bandwidth utilisation etc. This allows for base-lining of both the network and application in order to later reconstruct a very realistic Emulated network environment.
I’m excited by the uniqueness of the newest addition to our emulation family ”, said Frank Puranik, iTrinegy’s Product Director ‘When deciding on the development roadmap for testing applications, we know that our clients understand the importance of testing applications, they recognize the value of using an emulator to provide realistic network conditions, and to validate the test, but we have also noted that there is an increasing need to recreate, in full, the live network conditions and create a background network load’ Frank continues’ ‘In order to achieve this, we need to measure the existing applications performance. In developing INE Companion we can now provide full reporting and analysis which delivers the statistics needed for the true performance analysis in both the live and test networks.’
Recreating and Replaying “Real” Network Scenarios.
As emulation products continue to successfully recreate network conditions in a controlled and manageable environment a need has arisen to gain greater understanding of the conditions that ‘actually’ affect applications that are running in the WAN/LAN. INE Companion does just that, it monitors the ‘actual’ conditions experienced by applications so that those conditions can packaged into “Network Scenarios” that can be quickly loaded into one of iTrinegy’s network emulator products. INE Companion looks specifically at the real network and can tell you what the traffic is experiencing, i.e. bandwidth limits, jitter, loss, delay etc, which in turn allows the emulator to be even more realistic as those anomalies can be directly replicated.
‘INE Companion is in essence ‘a companion’ for delivering the whole picture of how applications are performing and affecting each other in the ‘Actual’ WAN and transferring that information to the emulator for real time testing’. Said Frank ‘The feedback from our clients has been very positive and it validates the time and effort in developing INE Companion.’
The combined highlights of this technology fusion are the abilities to:
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Analyze the production (or emulated) network's general health by monitoring application response times and measuring performance
- Measuring application bandwidth utilization and overall bandwidth utilization, and Full Reporting on what is running over the network.
- Generate network scenarios for the iTrinegy Network Emulator range to use directly with just a couple of clicks
- Generate packets for feeding into the iTrinegy emulators to re-create background loads, including being able to specify traffic profiles, which 'fool' network devices into thinking they are from other applications
- Capture packets from existing network links
- Replay captured packets
- Decode captured packets to see what was in the packets, useful when de-bugging performance issues.
INE Companion is aimed at anyone interested in the behaviour of their applications in the network (“actual” or “emulated”) including: Network Specialists, Application Developers, Testers and QA Specialists. INE Companion is part of a suite of network emulator products that are used in full multi-user, multi-site tests for many world-wide organisations.
In addition to being used for base-lining and capturing network activity for replay, INE Companion can be deployed as a powerful network troubleshooting tool as it comes with real-time alerting and reporting functionality.