July 30th, 2008
BreakingPoint adds real-time Twitter traffic protocol to network equipment testing tools
At this point pretty much everyone knows that Twitter has become a critical business communication tool. Right? And as an increasing amount of business users — everyone from independent consultants to CEOs and even corporations such as Comcast — are using Twitter for branding or engagement of some sort, the Twitter user base is skyrocketing. Right? But that’s OK because aside from Twitter’s own stability issues, the rest of us users can continue to tweet and direct message and brand our little hearts out without worrying about our own network stability.
Wrong.
Twitter’s roughly 2 million user base is growing at an estimated monthly clip of 6 percent. A large portion of those 2 million users are likely the business users I mentioned above. And, as a considerable amount of those business users are on company-sanctioned Twitter time, there’s a whole lot of microblogging traffic flying through company networks. As with any application (relative examples being IM and other P2P), even too much unaccounted-for Twitter traffic could affect your company’s network performance. IT managers need to discern how much network traffic his or her networking devices can handle before making a purchasing decision and subsequent deployment. Especially in companies with excessive amounts of social media-savvy users, these IT managers are likely already asking their networking vendors about social networking application traffic.
Because the Twitter phenomenon for businesses is still relatively new there’s a good chance that many of the currently deployed networking devices have not yet been tested using Twitter traffic. BreakingPoint, a testing systems company that creates tools for network equipment manufacturers, today announced (via a Twitter press release) a new application protocol that the company claims will allow network equipment manufacturers — including those who develop routers, switches and security appliances — to test the boundaries of their future products against real-time Twitter traffic.
I did a quick Q&A with BreakingPoint developer Todd Manning, who created the Twitter application protocol, to find why this testing is seemingly so important.
Q. [Jennifer] How important is testing network device performance with apps like Twitter?
A. [Todd] If you’re interested in testing networking gear, especially equipment that does any kind of deep packet inspection such as IPS equipment, it is important that the testing you do reflect, as closely as possible, the real kinds of protocols and applications your network actually sees. By simulating realistic Twitter clients, the Twitter AppSim protocol (AppSim is the feature within BreakingPoint testing platform to test with the different application protocols) will send packets that match the sizes and content you would expect to see in a network where real Twitter users are active.
Q. What other “social networking” apps would BreakingPoint consider supporting for testing?
A. The first candidates for social networking applications would be those requested by our customers. The development team has a list of protocols we are working on, but if a client came to us with a need to simulate some specific application, we would want to accommodate that need quickly. This actually happens all the time around other applications and we typically can deliver the protocol for testing in a day or so. Since most social networking applications like Twitter are really just riding on top of HTTP, it would be simple to add.
Next: Can this help Twitter’s performance issues? –>
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Jennifer Leggio, aka "Mediaphyter," writes about the "social business" side of social media - including enterprise, security and reputation issues. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations.
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