Evaluating Hammer Network Traffic Simulator: System Benchmarking and Testbed Integration

In this article, we have partially benchmarked Hammer, a real-world end-to-end network traffic simulator, and demonstrated some of its capabilities on testing actual platforms deployed in production-like networking environments. Hammer was integrated to a complex testbed and proved capable of identifying the operational breaking point or the target node, as well as obtaining several metrics for its behavior. The tool supports an immense number of use cases for functional, stress or capacity testing and offers inherent acceleration in the data plane, thus delivering high performance levels. Its resource-savvy nature and modular design, offers excellent scalability and performs significantly better with latest generation CPUs, indicating the software's suitability for high-demanding tasks when installed in contemporary servers in bare-metal.