At an industry event this week, Spirent (News - Alert) and Net Optics demonstrated the importance of visibility for securing mission-critical business applications in NFV environments.

For the demonstration, Spirent Avalanche Virtual along with Phantom Virtualization Tap were used to show visitors how one can defend against intense attack levels across virtualized networks without compromising on the quality of experience – an essential requirement for securing networks and retaining customers.

Angus Robertson, senior director of networks & applications group at Spirent Communications (News - Alert), said, “The ability to baseline the performance and scale of virtual switches and NFV virtual appliances is a critical starting point for those building equipment for these networks and the entities which operate them. Avalanche Virtual and Spirent TestCenter Virtual solutions continue to play a significant role in validation of virtualization infrastructure—including testing performance and scale of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Virtual Switches.”

The Phantom Virtualization Tap is designed to give users a complete monitoring perspective. As virtualization expands, many instrumentation layer tools are developed for hypervisors and virtual machines and there is a possibility that virtualization speeds can outpace users’ ability to monitor both the virtual and physical aspect of an environment. The Phantom Virtualization Tap, by offering total access capabilities and unrestricted monitoring facility, enables monitoring and access control in dynamic and distributed virtual environments and eliminates the need for promiscuous mode v-switches, dedicated probes or counterintuitive shaping and routing.

The Spirent Avalanche Virtual is stated to be a cloud testing solution designed to test and measure the Performance, Availability, Security and Scalability (PASS) of virtualized network infrastructures and of applications deployed in the cloud. It resides in virtualized data center environments and is capable of accurately measuring the impact of large-scale cloud-based application deployments against their expected quality of experience.