Customer Case Study
Riverbed Technology loads up their Steelhead® product line using the SwiftTest 3000
Riverbed®, a provider of WAN optimization solutions, is able to more effectively test CIFS scalability
on their Steelhead solutions using the SwiftTest 3000. Before SwiftTest, extreme-scale testing was resource
and time intensive using in-house test tools.
About Riverbed Technology
Riverbed is the IT performance company for networks, applications, and storage, providing comprehensive
WAN optimization solutions. Riverbed products address a host of performance problems that customers experience
across a variety of scenarios. An award-winning line of WAN optimization solutions gives businesses an
order-of-magnitude increase in the performance and value of their existing IT infrastructure and mission-critical
applications.
The applications Riverbed accelerates include file sharing, email, backup, document management systems,
IT tools, ERP, and CRM. At the heart of Riverbed's business is the Steelhead product line. Steelhead
speeds application performance and data transfer over the WAN, overcoming both bandwidth and latency
problems to deliver the highest performance available on the market today. Steelhead products go beyond
simply offering WAN optimization to help make your IT infrastructure run faster, better, and more securely
— they operate in the data center, at a branch office, in a worker's laptop, and in public and
private clouds
Riverbed Test Environment
The QA environment at Riverbed that's a match for SwiftTest is the Steelhead appliance testing lab.
Riverbed's senior QA manager is Ken Sarno who manages a team of 22-23 engineers — including CIFS
protocol experts. Ken and the QA group execute load and performance tests using some off-the-shelf tools
such as NetBench. But the bulk of testing is accomplished using in-house tools written by the Riverbed
team. Their hardware setup is straightforward with all devices on the same switch and little pressure
on the network.The challenges arise when the QA team needs to give the most scalable of Riverbed's products
a full workout.
Today, Riverbed products have developed past the point of testing with in-house tools. The Steelhead
7050 is designed for the data center and can handle up to 100,000 concurrent TCP connections. This is
a point at which Riverbed homegrown tools become cumbersome and require many hardware resources. Ken
was specifically interested in assessing the Steelhead capacity to accelerate file sharing, which means
thorough CIFS testing. CIFS is complex, requiring a test tool with complete implementation of the protocol
and flexible configuration options. Configuring such a setup can be challenging, and Ken is without good
tools for generating that many simultaneous connections.
"SwiftTest proved to be a great company to work with. They were responsive and they listened —
making fixes and getting their system to do just what we wanted. I like to work with smart teams doing
clever things."
– Michael Michon, Director of Software QA Engineering
Enter SwiftTest
The Riverbed team periodically scouts for test tools out in the marketplace. Discovering that SwiftTest
had CIFS expertise in particular, Riverbed acquired a SwiftTest 3000 system for evaluation. Michael Michon,
Director of Software QA Engineering at Riverbed, found SwiftTest as a company to be responsive beyond
the norm in the industry, and was impressed with their willingness to enhance the product to meet Riverbed's
specific needs. Ken Sarno says that the SwiftTest team was quick to address issues and that fix turnaround
was very good. He observed that SwiftTest is very committed to supporting their customers.
About the SwiftTest 3000
A high-performance load-generating system, the SwiftTest 3000 is designed for comprehensive functional
and performance testing of IP storage. More than a load generator, the system provides protocol-level
control and semantic definition that enables the broadest possible range of test cases. The SwiftTest
3000 features 8 singly configurable 1GE ports, each capable of a million TCP connections. It also has
a 1GE management port and supports multiple authentication types, originates NFS, CIFS, iSCSI, and HTTP
traffic, and easily handles multiple scenarios with varying lists of commands—all running concurrently.
The SwiftTest 3000 is the storage industry's elite testing tool due to its storage-specific features,
high-volume traffic handling, customer-centric graphic interface, and an automation framework.
Test Development Environment
The SwiftTest 3000 includes a graphical application, the SwiftTest Test Development Environment, that
provides flexible, granular configuration options and test results analysis. Testers can now find problems,
modify parameters, and quickly see results using the SwiftTest interface. Problem isolation is fast and
accurate, leading to much-appreciated efficiency in working with development engineers.
The Results
Riverbed uses the SwiftTest 3000 to simulate extreme loads on their Steelhead systems, working in the
SwiftTest TDE to set up testing scenarios. For Riverbed, the SwiftTest system is a complement to their
other test tools, greatly extending their capabilities. Ken can now put the 7050 through its paces, getting
a clear picture of exactly what happens in a fully scaled-up, real world customer environment. As well,
the SwiftTest 3000 plays a part in Ken's regression testing. The bottom line? Riverbed uses the SwiftTest
3000 to perform tests much more easily, faster, and with fewer hardware resources than before.
"We can now run tests that were very hard to do before. We couldn't test 10,000 CIFS connections
quickly using our in-house tools. Now we can."
– Ken Sarno, Senior Manager, QA
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