TRAC Research Report Highlights Value of Network Emulation

Aug. 16, 2012 - PRLog -- Apposite® Technologies, the leader in enterprise-class WAN emulation products, and TRAC Research, a market research and analyst company specializing in IT performance management, today released the research report “The Value of Network Emulation” based on case studies with Apposite users.

Bandwidth constraints, network latency, packet loss, and other impairments impact the performance of applications running over the WAN. Network emulators simulate these WAN conditions to allow enterprise IT departments to assess application responsiveness prior to roll-out and optimize the end user experience for applications already deployed.

To examine how network emulators are being used by enterprise IT departments, TRAC conducted structured interviews with several Apposite customers, and summarized the findings in case studies of four users:
•   Multinational insurance company managing datacenter replication and application consolidation
•   International banking company building local branches far from headquarters
•   Global investment firm troubleshooting problems with applications in the field
•   Cloud computing infrastructure provider validating performance of applications over the internet.

As a result of these interviews, TRAC concluded that by offering visibility into the end-user experience, network emulation has become a key enabler for a wide variety of use cases, including datacenter replication, application consolidation, new technology rollouts, changes in network topology, cloud migrations, WAN optimization deployments, and many other situations. Network emulation technology helps IT staff understand bottlenecks and proactively address performance issues before they impact users, avoiding expensive troubleshooting and panic situations after deployment.  

“Network emulation is an important, but still often overlooked tool for testing and optimizing application performance,” notes Bojan Simic, president of TRAC Research.  “We strongly recommend the use of a network emulator as a best practice for a wide variety of application testing, from simulating high latency links connecting branch offices to checking datacenter replication over 10 Gbps lines. In speaking with customers, we have found an extremely high level of satisfaction with the features, cost-performance, and ease-of-use of the Apposite WAN emulation products.”

The TRAC report can be downloaded free of charge from the Apposite website at:  http://www.apposite-tech.com/index.html