How Ecessa Tests Its Load Balancers and SD-WAN Solutions

load balancer and SDWAN testing

Ecessa Behind the Scenes: How We Test Our Load Balancers, Internet Failover and SD-WAN Products Before They Go to Work for Customers

Today, we’re sharing a behind-the-scenes look at Ecessa’s technology lab, where we test our customers’ network setups before deploying products on-site. Simply put, we use what we make and sell and never ship a product that we haven’t verified.

First things first. We use our own products. The Ecessa HQ production rack pictured below contains core switches, routers and Ecessa WAN devices that provide HA-pair WAN management capabilities for our facility.

We don’t just say our products help maintain uptime and create Never Down networks, we stake our business on it every single day. We monitor, manage and report the performance of our ISP services.

Like many organizations, we utilize cloud-based business applications and storage. We can’t afford to be down, so we have multiple ISP connections to the cloud powered by Ecessa load balancing and automatic failover.

Ecessa HQ production rack

Ecessa HQ production rack

Ecessa’s customer configuration test system is a key reason our solutions are so reliable. Our clients’ network environments differ from company to company and often from site to site. Customers can elect to have us create custom configuration files for their units based on their unique network needs.

We design, build and test them here at Ecessa HQ with active switches, routers and other network hardware to eliminate risks and hit issues before they’re installed in the customer’s production network. We find and fix bugs here first, so our customers don’t have to.

Ecessa customer configuration test system

Ecessa customer configuration test system

Ecessa believes in using world-class equipment for testing our products. These JDSU Ethernet testers and traffic generators allow us to flood our products with a crazy amount of UDP and TCP traffic to uncover any issues well before we release software to our customers. Our motto? Use the best to be the best.

JDSU Ethernet testers and traffic generators

JDSU Ethernet testers and traffic generators

Sometimes our customers’ networks are put under extreme performance pressure. That’s why we built a stress testing environment that is second to none. The rack shown below includes multiple devices configured as our customers would have them, with test equipment to emulate network, WAN and extreme traffic conditions. The only thing missing is a backhoe to cut WAN links – and we can simulate that, too!

In our lab, Apposite Netropy® emulators simulate bandwidth, latency, loss, congestion, and other network impairments to replicate real-world scenarios, including high traffic over unstable connections.

Combined with the JDSU traffic generators, they enable us to thoroughly test and optimize the performance of our products under challenging and worst-case customer network conditions. Any issues discovered during testing are fixed prior to deployment.

Ecessa stress testing rack

Ecessa stress testing rack

We make sure our devices perform well, even when your ISP doesn’t.

This tour of Ecessa’s network setup and test environments was made possible by our Vice President of Development & Support, Mike Siegler, and Nick Saari, Ecessa software engineer. If you’re interested in talking to Mike, Nick or another Ecessa team member, please fill out the form below.



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