The ByteBlower :: Blowing Bits and Bytes – Cool Tech

The team at Excentis, located in Ghent, Belgium, have really outdone themselves with an incredibly cool packet generator which was on display at the Anga Cable 2012 show.  This is their second generation on the product, called the ByteBlower 2100.  It builds on the previous model, the ByteBlower 1000.  What does it do?  It generates packets of data – lot’s of them and very quickly and accurately.  Why is this important?  For everyone who has a test lab and needs to test things like DOCSIS 3.0!

So why did I like this piece of equipment so much?  First of all, its a very compact solution at 2U for 48 ports, scaling to 5U with three 1U switches for a massive 192 ports.  That makes it an affordable solution compared to many competitors.  Also, its line rates are up to 8 Gb/s or 5,952,380 packets per second with a latency precision of just 20 nano seconds.  That means you can jam roughly 31,000 packets per second into 192 cable modems.  Nice!  Take that upstream.

ByteBlower by Excentis 192 ports in rack

Some additional features:

  • ByteBlower supports copper and optical Ethernet interfaces
  • Real-world network behavior on the transport layer
  • Fixed port addresses or dynamic addressing using DHCP
  • Scheduled execution using batches
  • Automated project creation using Wizards
  • High port density
  • Automatic frame creation and addressing or control at bit level
  • Full control of start and stop times of each flow

For more information, be sure to check out Excentis’ website on the ByteBlower.