As the world leader in IP video management, Verint's Software Test Group was in search of a network tool that would allow us to simulate the harsh, and some times unpredictable, impairment conditions of real world network scenarios with IP video solutions. We were very fortunate to discover the Mini Maxwell. The Mini Maxwell tool is a unique testing solution that is easy to operate and extraordinarily cost-effective. It enabled us to emulate real-time effects of various network conditions such as packet loss, latency, and bandwidth, helping us detect and work to resolve any problems we find well in advance during our development process, assuring optimal performance from the end-user perspective. The Mini Maxwell is now an important, integral part of our test lab.

Our customers deploy our Solumina^TM Operations Process Management software in a wide variety of environments, including high performance local LANs, internal multi-site WANs and remote users who connect in over the public internet.

Our developers always work in a high performance LAN environment, so before release, we have a challenge insuring that our software delivers acceptable performance over the full range of customer environments.

We use Mini Maxwell to confirm that both our web browser and our Windows client user interface deliver a responsive user experience in the face of higher latency networks. We also use Mini Maxwell to confirm robustness in the face of network errors.

Previously, iBASEt has conducted network impairment testing using BSD Dummynet and Linux NistNet based test environments. Both of these approaches operate as routers and require us to reconfigure our test systems, network, and servers to route traffic through the test impairment subnets.

With Mini Mawell, I can hand any of our testers a small hardware appliance to insert between his workstation and the network, and download a pre-established test configuration, and the tester is up and running their same exact tests, but now in an impaired test environment. Mini Maxwell's web-based Graphical User Interface is far easier to understand and use than the arcane command line configurations in our previous environments. With Mini Maxwell, we spend more time testing and less time managing our test tools and equipment.

Visit iBASEt and the Solumina software for Operations Process Management at www.solumina.com