Paradial Rolls Out Network Emulator Solution

IP communication services provider Paradial (News - Alert) announced the availability of Paradial Advanced Network Emulator (PANE). The emulator helps organizations test, verify and deploy IP-based audio and video communication solutions across different network environments such as firewalls and Network Address Translation (NAT) barriers.

 

Organizations intending to deploy VoIP, unified communication (UC) and videoconferencing solutions face challenges that are created by firewalls, NAT devices,  Web proxies and switches. In order to gain good market reputation, solutions developed for these challenges must not fail due to changing and unknown network topologies. The solution should also exhibit high reliability, good quality of service (QoS) and security as well.

      

“Understanding the impact of firewalls and NATs is the necessary first step when analyzing, planning and addressing network traversal challenges,” said Knut Omang, at  Paradial.

 

The traffic on network between two communicating entities can be instantly routed across different paths and a path in PANE contains a network device. The communicating entities can be either client to server, server to server or client to client. The PANE paths can also make use of other network devices from different firewall and NAT vendor, which is an added feature. 

 

In PANE, factors such as delay and other network artifacts are configurable, per path. Network artifacts can be packet loss, reordering, and duplicates. Many paths can be configured in one PANE installation.

 

PANE, which is offered as a combined software and professional services solution incorporates a set of predefined paths that emulates different NAT and firewall types, including symmetric, port restricted, and UDP (News - Alert)-blocked. Other emulators can also be configured on PANE as well.

 

PANE is installed on a server ( with multiple physical or virtual network interfaces), which acts as a network gateway providing access to network resources, irrespective of the user's protocols or operating systems. The emulator provides a per-client configurable network emulation and firewall selection mechanism. The emulator is controlled by a command line tool, which is used to independently configure variables firewall/NAT type and network behavior (e.g. delay, jitter, packet loss).

 

The client nodes in the network utilize the IP address of the PANE gateway as its default route. The emulator controls the network's flow of data to determine the appropriate path and destination for packets.

 

“Through PANE, organizations reduce deployment risk and improve end users’ experiences,” said Ingvar Aaberg, CEO of Paradial, in a statement.

 

Paradial offers professional services and also develops and markets software technologies, especially challenges in IP communications. The company’s RealTunnel product, for example, enables secure media solutions to work across IP networks. 

 

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