Keysight delivers modular network cybersecurity test platform for hyperscale data centers

Keysight Technologies released APS-100/400GE Series network application and security modular test platform. This new platform delivers hyperscale encryption throughput that enables network equipment manufacturers (NEMs) and data centers operators to validate equipment to support the massive data volume and cybersecurity requirements of their customers.

Today’s hyperscale data center operators are preparing for unprecedented traffic volumes and ever-expanding attack surfaces. NEMs need to validate their next-generation firewalls for this emerging market, and data center operators must strike a balance between security and user experience in operation.

“Piecing together test systems to push new hyperscale data center devices to their limits has become cost prohibitive and unmanageable. This is especially true for simulating encrypted traffic and massive data sets like elephant flows found in artificial intelligence and machine learning use-cases,” said Ram Periakaruppan, vice president and general manager, Keysight’s Network Test and Security Solutions group. “Keysight’s APS Series delivers a new approach — a single application and security test platform — that modularly scales to double the encryption throughput per rack unit of the nearest competitor.”

Keysight’s APS platform includes the APS-M1010 controller and APS-ONE-100 appliance modules that can be stacked to provide hyperscale data center device manufacturers and operators with a cost-effective “pay-as-you-grow” approach to their cybersecurity testing needs. The approach preserves current and future investments as data center interfaces and speeds evolve from 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GE) to 400GE.

“The FortiGate 7121F is the world’s fastest next-generation firewall, achieving Security Compute Ratings of up to 19x better than competitor solutions to deliver enterprise security with ultra-scalable segmentation and threat protection,” said John Maddison, executive vice president of products and CMO at Fortinet. “It’s one thing to make these claims, it’s another to validate them with independent tests. That’s why we leverage the ground-breaking scale of Keysight’s new APS Series test system to validate that the FortiGate 7121F can scale to the promised performance to protect customers globally against the most advanced cyber threats.”

Supporting Keysight’s application performance and security test solutions, the APS Series test platform is a hyperscale Layer 4-7 test solution that helps identify performance and interoperability issues in devices and systems like next generation firewalls (NGFWs). It combines powerful multi-core, multi-threaded processors, crypto-acceleration, and cloud-native software to generate realistic, hyperscale-volume user and malware traffic under realistic conditions.

Keysight APS Series offers the following key customer benefits:

• Maximizes encryption performance while significantly reducing cost. Offers up to 3.5x more TLS connections per second (CPS) per 100G interface, and up to 4x cost reduction compared to the previous-generation test solution, as well as increased application mix throughput performance over encrypted Transport Layer Security (TLS) connections.
• Enables validation of elephant flows (transmission of large volumes of data over a single connection) featuring hyperscale performance (throughput per single TCP connection) with up 83 Gbps per single TCP connection – 5x performance improvement – for hyperscale environments.
• Delivers centralized management for a stack of up to 10 compute nodes that facilitates centralized software upgrades in a “single pane of glass” interface.