BreakingPoint Systems on Monday will unveil a high-end network equipment testing product that measures the overall security and resiliency of a network to attack and heavy traffic. The new Storm CTM (Cyber Tomography Machine), which performs full-blown simulated attacks and applications, also provides a scoring system for how the infrastructure performed under the duress of those tests.

Des Wilson, CEO of BreakingPoint, says the tool's testing method is more comprehensive than the typical penetration test or vulnerability scan. "This is not a penetration-testing tool," Wilson says. "It's running live attacks and applications through it...and running the equipment on the network the way the [organization] utilizes it in their network."

Storm CTM's metrics are for benchmarking equipment and network security and performance, he says. "As new threats are found globally or you're changing applications, for instance, you can rerun the resiliency tests and see if you're trending up or down in relation to the benchmark," he says.

Storm CTM simulates attacks and high-volume traffic and usage onto the switches, routers, firewalls, IPSes, servers, and data center systems. It generates resiliency scores and detects vulnerabilities and weaknesses in the infrastructure.

The new product, to which existing BreakingPoint customers are automatically upgraded, reflects BreakingPoint's shift in focus from selling test systems mainly to network equipment manufacturers to now offering solutions for enterprises and other organizations, as well. "The federal government and enterprises have reached out to us...including the NSA. This is the only product capable of generating these kinds of traffic," he says.

BreakingPoint's Storm CTM, which will ship in May, is priced from $150,000 to $500,000 or more, depending on configuration.

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