PHILADELPHIA, April 3 /PRNewswire/ --

Shunra Software (www.shunra.com) announced today that its test solution was used by Agilent Technologies Inc. to demonstrate the effects of network impairments on the performance of stateful TCP traffic generated by Agilent's N2X solution. The N2X solution validates the performance of next-generation network equipment for triple play services. The demo proved the importance of testing network performance using both stateful TCP and real-world network conditions. It is the only way to accurately assess how network-based services will perform and impact the user experience.

Shunra's WAN emulation solution provides real-world network and router behavior by introducing rate-limiting, latency, packet loss and router queuing schemes into the traffic flow. The results of the demonstration show that a certain number of bits and packets can move through the network, and that effective throughput, or goodput, can be dramatically lower when using stateful TCP traffic deployed in a real-world network with delays, congestion and queuing effects.

As a majority of Internet traffic today is stateful TCP traffic originating from e-mail, web-surfing and bandwidth-intensive peer-to-peer applications, the industry is moving away from basic stateless traffic blasting and towards a model that validates stateful forwarding performance at layer 4 and above.

Shunra is the world's leading provider of network emulation solutions. Shunra Virtual Enterprise (VE) is a highly robust, comprehensive network emulation solution which creates a virtual network environment in the pre-deployment network lab. It delivers a powerful, flexible and easy way to test the performance of applications and network equipment under a wide variety of network impairments -- exactly as if they were running in a real production environment. Helping organizations understand the impact of new technology rollouts on network and application performance, Shunra VE resolves any related issues before they impact end-users.

"The Shunra Virtual Enterprise solution plays a critical role in demonstrating the value proposition of our hardware-based stateful TCP traffic and measurement solution," said Rod Unverrich, general manager of Agilent's data networks operation. "Using Shunra VE, we were able to demonstrate the interaction between TCP and real-world impairments such as delay and packet loss, and various queuing mechanisms, all of which impact a router's ability to deliver quality of experience. Traffic blasting at L2 or L3 is simply insufficient in today's networks where subscriber experience is what pays the bills for service providers."

"We are proud to be working with Agilent Technologies and we view our involvement in this project as validation of the value our application performance testing solution provides. Considering their well known supplier expectation centered on technology, quality, and performance, it is very meaningful to us that they have selected our product to feature in their TCP traffic performance demonstration video," said Matt Reid, VP Worldwide Marketing.

To view the demonstration video please visit: http://www.shunra.com/network_simulation_products.

About Shunra

Shunra Virtual Enterprise is the market leader in WAN emulation solutions for application performance testing throughout the entire application development lifecycle. Shunra's award-winning solutions enable development, quality assurance, pre-deployment and operations teams to create an exact replica of their production environment or design what-if network scenarios; allowing them to predict exactly how applications or infrastructure changes will perform in any networked environment-before rollout. Shunra's solutions and services are typically deployed in projects including data center consolidation; application performance readiness testing; VoIP testing; website testing and WAN optimization technology testing.

Shunra's solutions and services are used by thousands of customers worldwide. Clients include 3M, Boeing, Cisco, Dow Chemical, EMC, FedEx, General Motors, JPMorgan Chase, Kelly Services, Merrill Lynch, Motorola, Nestle, Pitney Bowes, and Vodafone. Shunra has offices in New York City, Philadelphia, Israel, and the UK. Shunra is also supported through a global network of channel partners. For more information on Shunra, please visit www.shunra.com.

Shunra VE is a trademark of Shunra Software Ltd. All other trademarks and registered trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners.

Web site: http://www.shunra.com

Rhoan Morgan of Shunra, +1-267-519-5109, rhoan.morgan@shunra.com