Caw Networks, a company that specializes in Internet infrastructure and equipment, has updated WebAvalanche, a “capacity assessment appliance” for supporting streaming media testing to version 4.0.
WebAvalanche isn’t for your typical end user. It’s designed for network equipment manufacturers, service providers and Web site managers and can generate in excess of 20,000 HTTP requests per second, supports both HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1 traffic, RTSP/RTP, SSL and cookies.
Caw’s high-performance appliance-based approach enables the generation of over 10,000 concurrent RTSP/RTP streams to assess the real-world capacity of large RTSP/RTP server farms with QuickTime Streaming Servers and RealSystem Servers serving QuickTime files, according to Andrew Foss, CEO of Caw Networks.
RTSP/RTP is a new protocol addition to WebAvalanche, which currently supports HTTP and SSL traffic. RTSP/RTP support in WebAvalanche simplifies the setup and configuration of performance tests for large scale streaming media infrastructure, and eliminates the need to configure large farms of personal computers with streaming clients, Foss said.
CDNs and service providers can use WebAvalanche 4.0 to validate that their infrastructures can support large number of streams at different bandwidths and packet loss rates, he added. They can also ascertain that bandwidth allocations are appropriate to support customer SLAs and QoS guarantees, he added.