The latest version of iTrinegy's INE Enterprise and INE Ultra multi-port network emulators (virtual network products) now incorporate Port Virtualization which enables a standard 2 or 4 port model to support application performance testing over many links (200+) without the need for additional physical ports.

This capability will dramatically reduce the cost of testing application performance in environments such as mobile application deployment, online gaming, and the delivery of online content (e.g. video on demand, streaming media etc.) as well as emergency service and military networks and the emerging Internet of Things (IoT).

iTrinegy’s Port Virtualization capability is similar in concept to the well-established practices of server virtualization and storage virtualization as it enables the network emulator’s physical ports to be partitioned so that multiple devices can be connected to the one network port with each “believing” that it is connected to its own separate port. Conventional hard-wired network emulators lack this capability, requiring every connected device to be plugged into its own physical port. As a consequence, running even relatively small scale tests involving 6, 8 or 10 devices necessitates the use of an emulator with the equivalent number of physical ports which can quickly become cost-prohibitive.

With iTrinegy Port Virtualization, provided the total combined throughput demands of the connected devices don’t exceed the bandwidth capability of the physical port then it is possible to run application performance tests just using the 2 or 4 ports that come as standard with these models.

By way of example, if you needed to create a test environment to check the delivery of online content (TV, Video on Demand…) to say, 30 subscriber homes, each with a 30Mbps connection, then the combined bandwidth demand will be 30 x 30Mbps (900Mbps) which can be easily accommodated via a single 1Gbps (1000Mbps) port of an INE Enterprise. Where you need to scale up your testing to 200 devices, INE Ultra with its 10Gbps ports would be able to handle this demand with ease.

"Our customers have advised us that, as the number of connected devices proliferates, they need to create ever larger virtual test networks in which to validate application performance. Our port virtualization capability helps them achieve this objective in an extremely cost-effective manner.” said Frank Puranik, Product Director at iTrinegy. “Port Virtualization is just one of a range of new features the latest release incorporates, which includes the ability to handle over four times the volume of data of our previous models and allow multi-tenancy. Multi-tenancy enables different teams to simultaneously run their own individual emulations at a time that suits them rather than waiting in line until another team has finished using the emulator."

INE Ultra (10Gbps/port) and INE Enterprise (1Gbps/port) are iTrinegy’s high-performance, multi-port network emulators (virtual network products) capable of recreating fully routed network environments such as Meshed, Star-Coupled, Chained Hop, MPLS & Point-to-Point Networks, and any combination of the above, in order to test how applications behave in these networks prior to actual deployment.

Trusted and relied upon by governments, military organizations and corporate enterprises across the globe, INE Ultra and NE Enterprise support the most demanding requirements of organizations needing to test with a real-world Emulation solution that meets all the configuration requirements of the most complex to the most simple high-performance networks.

Both products deliver the behavior of any high (or low) speed production network, including wireless and mobile networks, within a controlled and repeatable test environment helping users to mitigate the risk of introducing new applications into existing production networks or migrating existing applications into new network environments such as the Cloud or The Internet of Things (IoT).