May 2002

Empirix: Putting The Next In Next-Gen

BY GREG GALITZINE

Hot on the heels of an Internet Telephony Product of the Year award in January 2002, Wilmington, MA-based Empirix recently snagged a Market Engineering Leadership award from analysts Frost & Sullivan. The honor was bestowed upon Empirix for their leadership position in the VoIP testing segment of our industry.

In fact, according to Sailaja Vepa, Test and Measurement industry analyst with Frost & Sullivan, Empirix is a leader in the VoIP market at 24.4 percent of the market six percent greater than its nearest competitor and is certainly deserving of the 2001 Market Engineering Leadership award.

Now, I dont usually use this space to discuss the prizes and blue ribbons that grace the trophy shelf of a particular company, but I thought it worth mentioning because Empirix has been on a roll as of late. In the last 12 months the company has enjoyed tremendous success in the market, continuing to sell their products to the network equipment manufacturers who now more than ever need to test their products to ensure they are the best they can possibly be before they leave the lab on their way to the real world. In this economy, vendors need to be doubly sure that their wares will work as advertised.

But Empirix is not content to simply rest on the laurels and move existing product to their customer base. At the recent Voice on the Net industry trade show in Seattle, Empirix Communications Infrastructure Test Group (formerly Hammer Technologies) unveiled their latest creation: The Hammer NXT.

The NXT is being billed as the industrys first truly integrated Carrier Class TDM/IP test platform for VoIP application testing. As networks continue to evolve, so Empirix testing solutions have continued to evolve in lockstep. An ever-increasing array of network elements is being deployed, and there is a significant need to be able to test and verify these elements. The Hammer NXT allows equipment manufacturers and service providers to isolate individual elements within the network (e.g., media gateways, application servers, etc.) and perform various types of analyses on those elements. No longer are engineers limited to simple TDM to TDM tests across the whole network, but rather the Hammer NXT was designed to give them the ability to drill down into the network to get a much better idea of whats happening. Also, carriers can now test multiple next-generation applications, such as toll bypass, Class 5 services, and the as yet unknown enhanced services that developers are busy working on in labs across the globe.

The Hammer NXTs blade-based architecture can generate up to 50,000 simultaneous calls using a mix of TDM over DS-3 interfaces using SS7, CAS and ISDN signaling, and SIP/IP with a real RTP media. Future releases will incorporate such signaling protocols as MGCP and MEGACO. As for scalability, multiple Hammer NXTs can be linked together to simulate traffic volumes of over 250,000 simultaneous calls.

A short list of Hammer NXT Test applications includes:

• High-density path confirmation and voice quality testing of VoIP applications including TDM-TDM and IP-TDM;
• Verify VoIP application performance with detailed call measurements including call rates, capacity, errors, and end-to-end call routing verification;
• Failover testing, to ensure background circuits engage seamlessly when primary circuit goes down;
• Voice quality testing with full background loading on system under test;
• Voice quality testing when confronted with real world network impairments;
• Network level functional or performance testing;
• Device isolation testing for trunking, signaling, and access gateways, switching platforms, softswitches, and IP end points; and
• Verify QoS algorithms with network metrics including packet loss, latency, and jitter.

The Hammer NXT is available immediately. Subsequent upgrades to the product will be made available at approximately two-month intervals, adding features such as OC-3 scalability, advanced SIP test capabilities, and more, so make sure you check with Empirix to see whats NXT on the list of available options. For more information, visit the company online at www.empirix.com.

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