Apposite Technology Inc. , a five-year-old firm specializing in Wide Area Network emulation gear, today announced a new product that allows service providers to see how complex business applications will perform over differing WAN conditions.

Today's enterprises need to connect multiple sites over the WAN and know that business applications will perform in the same way at branch offices as they do at the headquarters office, says D.C. Palter, president of Apposite. Service providers are being challenged to not just provide connectivity but to guarantee how applications will perform and what the end-user experience will be, he says.

The Apposite Netropy network emulator is designed to emulate typical network conditions, including latency, jitter, loss, and congestion, to determine how these impact the increasingly complex enterprise applications such as IP voice and video, file sharing, and storage. [Ed. note: And The Apposite Netropies would be a great name for a rock band.]

"The only way to know how an application is going to perform in the network is either to install it in those distributed sites, which is painful, time-consuming, and expensive, or simulate that network so you can recreate conditions locally to see how applications would look at that site," Palter said.

Netropy's Emulation Engine can model dozens of concurrent WAN links up to 10 Gigabits per second, Palter said. It can simulate multi-site networks and benchmark how specific applications perform under real-world network conditions, and also enable a side-by-side comparison of network products to see how they perform.

Network equipment vendors offer testing tools, but Palter says those are too often focused primarily or singularly on the physical layer of the network, and not on how applications are performing.

"That is starting to change," Palter says. "With managed services and cloud computing, for example, service providers are looking more at the end-user performance."

— Carol Wilson, Chief Editor, Events, Light Reading