Introducing Keysight’s APS-M8400 8 x 400GE Application and Security Test Appliance: Powering Network Application and Security Testing at Hyperscale
I like streaming movies as much as the next person, but I was astounded when I read that the World Bank’s estimate of global internet traffic for the past year - an incredible 4.8 zettabytes or 4,800,000,000,000 gigabytes - equated to 325 million households watching Netflix simultaneously, around the clock…for an entire year!
In response to the exponential growth in traffic volumes driven by video streaming, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and an explosion of IoT devices, industry is increasingly adopting 400G to address the constant need for higher capacity connectivity, putting unprecedented demands on network infrastructure like next generation firewalls and application delivery controllers, making it more critical than ever that data center network equipment manufacturers (NEMs) and operators validate that their solutions can support these hyperscale loads without compromising security or usability.
Keysight's new APS-M8400 8 x 400GE application and network security test appliance addresses this challenge by delivering a 400GE platform that offers flexible aggregation of compute and FPGA resources to optimize the performance and scalability requirements for any simulated workload, using one or multiple 400GE test interfaces.
The APS-M8400 features industry leading, ultrafast 8 x 400GE QSFP-DD native I/O and employs a modular approach that allows users to stack APS-ONE-100 appliances and scale up to 16 of these compute nodes to create a system capable of generating 3.2 Tbps of L4-7 traffic, 5.1 billion concurrent TCP connections, 2.4 Tbps of transport layer security (TLS) traffic, and 1.6 million TLS connections per second - all orchestrated by BreakingPoint, Keysight’s powerful, all-in-one applications and network security testing platform.
APS-M8400 8 x 400GE QSDP-DD Application and Security Test Appliance
The APS-M8400 is designed as a "pay-as-you-grow" solution, allowing users to build out a system that supports today's test needs and spending constraints, with the flexibility to add capacity as requirements change and budgets allow. Fanout support preserves existing test capabilities while single pane of glass management allows the APS-M8400 appliance to easily manage anywhere from 1 to 16 APS-ONE-100 compute nodes, simplifying system upgrades and maintenance.
Unfortunately, these explosive traffic volumes also carry over to the cyber threat landscape where we have seen a steep rise in threat vectors like DDoS attacks which increased by more than 800% quarter over quarter in some cases, including a record breaking hyper-volumetric DDoS attack in Feb 2023 that reached 71 million request per second, eclipsing the prior dubious record by more than half.
The APS-M8400 with BreakingPoint allows users to test the resilience of critical infrastructure and services at scale, delivering real-world traffic, including legitimate and malicious traffic, simultaneously, from a single port - featuring 700+ real-world application protocols and more than 150,000+ security attacks from enterprise to cloud-scale, including 40+ DDoS scenarios.
Just six months ago researchers set a record for data transfer at 1.8 petabits per second, or a million gigabits per second. And while petabit link speeds outside of the lab probably aren’t on the horizon just yet, it’s clear data usage and connection speeds aren’t going to be decreasing anytime soon. Keysight’s new APS-M8400 addresses the massive bandwidth demands being placed on network infrastructure providers today by providing industry leading 8 x 400GE port density, hyperscale performance, ease of management, flexible testing options and robust application and threat testing support to offer peace of mind that critical applications, services, and infrastructure can be validated to withstand these demands going forward.
To learn more about Keysight's APS-M8400 8 x 400GE application and security test appliance please visit https://www.keysight.com/us/en/products/network-test/network-test-hardware/aps-100400ge-series.html.