Shunra (News - Alert) (News - Alert) Software, announced version 5.30 of the Shunra Virtual Enterprise (VE) Suite, its WAN emulation solution. Shunra VE is a suite of application and network performance solutions, designed to help users test application performance under a variety of network conditions.

Speaking to Shunra’s Rhoan Morgan at Interop (News - Alert) (News - Alert) today, I learned that many of the enhancements that were included in this latest version of Shunra’s VE WAN emulation software were driven by customer demand.

According to Morgan, the new software offering is founded on months of research and customer validation on Shunra’s newest hardware platform, the STA.

The STA appliance allows network equipment manufacturers and enterprise customers to support network services at aggregate rates up to 24Gbps rates. Morgan also pointed out that the STA is the world’s first network processor-based WAN emulation appliance providing both wire-speed performance and deep packet inspection (DPI).

Shunra VE Suite version 5.30 also includes the new VE Analysis Package, a software bundle designed to help developers quickly identify specific business transactions that might fall prey to performance problems when deployed in full production. A recent Shunra white paper explains that "during performance testing, automated packet captures are recorded for the transactions of interest. From there, automated analysis tools provide insights into the behavior of transactions based on the packet flows involved in the transaction."

Among the major benefits of the new VE Analysis Package is a significant reduction in root cause discovery, reportedly reduced from weeks to hours.

Earlier this month, Shunra announced that their test solution was used by Agilent (News - Alert) (News - Alert) Technologies to demonstrate the effects of network impairments on the performance of stateful TCP traffic in an Agilent test designed to look at triple play services. The demo proved that testing network performance using both stateful TCP and real-world network conditions is necessary to accurately view how network-based services will perform and how they will affect the end user’s quality of experience.

Version 5.30 of Virtual Enterprise is currently generally available and live demonstrations can be viewed by visiting the company’s Web site.