Wi-Fi is poised to break the gigabit barrier with the introduction of the next generation of the 802.11 standard known as IEEE 802.11ac. This new technology promises to deliver higher bandwidth and improved quality of experience (QoE) for end users, and we expect rapid adoption into enterprise, residential, and carrier access points. Residential video streaming, data synchronizing between mobile devices, and data backup will be some of the first applications to make use of 802.11ac’s blazing-fast speed.   Read more »

VoLTE is the next killer application for wireless. It will help LTE service providers to differentiate on superior call quality to compete against the likes of Skype, GoogleTalk, and other low-cost voice services. As with any new technology, test vendors need to launch solutions early to provide the tools equipment vendors and service providers need as they engineer their VoLTE device, networks, and services. Read more »

As data center cloud networks are evolving to better-support the demands of multiplay service scalability, bring-your-own-device connectivity, and mission-critical application reliability, we’re seeing a greater need for holistic testing of data center and cloud networks. Test equipment must broaden its reach to all aspects of data center deployment and performance. Ixia is showing new data center products for impairment, security, networking, application delivery, and Wi-Fi in our booth #1262 at Interop 2012 in Las Vegas from May 8 – 10.

The latest additions to Ixia’s offerings enable validation of all key data center components for multi-tenant clouds, including: Read more »

Driven by the explosion of media-rich applications, network equipment manufacturers, service providers, and enterprises must achieve high performance and quality of experience (QoE) by fine-tuning their network infrastructures and services.

Application delivery infrastructures must be equipped to sustain large numbers of concurrent sessions, connections, transactions, and tunnels and have the elasticity to meet peak usage. Network deployments often run smoothly with legitimate traffic, but break down when subjected to attacks or stresses from malicious traffic. Technology and service complexity and the sheer load on the network have created a “perfect storm” for test engineers. Read more »

Industry standards are the foundational building blocks that enable the rapidly-evolving technology necessary to support enterprise and end user demands for innovative, faster, and highly-available communication. As network equipment manufacturers (NEMs) and service providers implement new technologies, they also need tools to validate conformance to standards, functionality, interoperability, performance, and scalability. Read more »

A mole becomes a beauty mark, a gnarled tree branch shows determination, scars on a whale’s fluke tell a living story…in nature, imperfections can be a mark of advantage, adding character and staking a claim to individuality.

But on a network, imperfections can put companies at a huge disadvantage. The ugly truth is that subscriber volatility is fueled by packet delay, jitter, packet loss, and other problems that impair and disrupt vital services. These network imperfections are an unavoidable weakness that network designers and application authors need to mitigate.

Network impairments must be discovered and rectified, especially for quality-sensitive service infrastructure such as: Read more »

Network test labs are constantly subjected to the opposing forces of meeting time-to-market objectives while guaranteeing outstanding product quality. At the same time, business-critical objectives that require new technologies or personnel redistribution regularly bring new challenges to the test lab. For example, new deployments of cloud-based data and software delivery systems introduce complexity into network designs and increase the variety of test equipment that must be included in network tests. And companies are placing regional test teams all across the globe – each with its own isolated test lab and resources. Read more »

As service providers and large enterprises implement the switches and routers that best suit their needs, a quilted patchwork of network fabric emerges that offers rich functionality, but also brings complexity to traffic management. Spun in the halls of academia, the OpenFlow communications protocol brings simplification by centralizing access to switch and router forwarding planes. Those implementing this promising new technology need testing tools to verify protocol conformance and tune designs before deployment. Read more »

Thirteen vendors participated in a wide-ranging MPLS and Ethernet multi-vendor interoperability, bringing aggregation, access, CPE, and test equipment to a two-week hot-staging event in Berlin, Germany in January. Test equipment from Ixia was used to generate, measure, impair, and analyze Ethernet, IPv6, and MPLS traffic. Ixia also participated in the live, public showcase of the interoperability at MPLS & Ethernet World Congress, February 8 - 10, 2012 in Paris, France.

Ixia was instrumental in validating key IPv6 and MPLS-TP technologies required by equipment vendors, network operators, and enterprises in deploying the latest advances necessary to keep up with the growing demands of user.

Testing IPv6 transition mechanisms Read more »

Mobile network cyber-attacks will grow significantly over the next 24 months, driven by the proliferation of smart devices, and are increasingly launched from social network services. Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are one of the fastest-growing threats in mobile networks. Mobile operators with weak security strategies risk service quality degradation and network downtime, and put customer assets at risk. Today’s general lack of security on client devices make them vulnerable to mobile malware attacks. Read more »

Wireless networks are evolving rapidly and driving the need for a significant evolution in test systems. Traffic scale, complexity, and the introduction of new media-rich applications have placed a premium on choosing the proper test system.

Here’s my list of the top five required areas for excellence in today’s wireless test systems: Read more »

Voice and SMS services are the primary revenue sources for mobile operators, contributing nearly 80 percent of the overall revenue. As operators upgrade their 2G and 3G networks to LTE, they need the confidence that they can continue to provide customers with high voice quality and reliability. Voice over LTE (VoLTE) testing is a priority for these operators. Read more »

Ixia’s iSimCity laboratory in Santa Clara, CA was host to the Lippis Report’s test of the Supervisor Engine 2T(Sup2T), Cisco’s latest upgrade to its Catalyst 6500 switch. The Lippis Report used Ixia’s industry-leading test solutions to verify Cisco’s claims of the Sup2T’s higher performance, better scalability, and enhanced hardware-enabled features for security, quality of service (QoS), virtualization, and manageability. Read more »

2012 promises to be a huge year for 10 and 40GbE data center switching equipment. Once again, Ixia has teamed with the Lippis Report for the 4th round of open industry data center switch performance benchmark testing. The spring 2012 event will evaluate the forwarding performance and power consumption of 10/40Gbps switching fabrics in the context of high-scale data center clouds.  Read more »

Carriers are replacing legacy TDM-based mobile backhaul networks with IP/Ethernet-based solutions to cost-effectively scale their networks and accommodate bandwidth-hungry mobile devices. However, carriers must overcome timing challenges because native IP/Ethernet technology does not address the packet synchronization of the TDM networks they aim to replace. Read more »

Cloud everywhere. The marketing hype promises simplicity. End equipment vendors claim their solutions can nearly rack themselves and applications mutate on their own or dynamically configure the network. But we’re a long way from five 9’s service in the wild-west of cloud. Public, private, hybrid, IaaS, SaaS, PASS (lol), infinitum… But what really makes a high-performance cloud tick? Read more »

With all sights set on expanding bandwidth and speed, 10/40 gigabit Ethernet promises to capture a lot of attention this year. 40GE switches are the new muscle cars that are beginning to power leading-edge enterprise networks. Virtualization and network convergence is driving huge volumes of traffic across data center switching fabrics. The capacity and forwarding performance of this fabric is critical to ensuring timely delivery of service and application traffic, and the associated end-user experience. Read more »

Many service providers already have IPv6 supported in their core networks and have made significant progress toward supporting IPv6 on their access networks as well. However, compared to their service provider counterparts, enterprise IT departments are lagging behind when it comes to planning for IPv6 traffic. Read more »

Economic and competitive pressures have led financial enterprises to make business assets and sensitive information accessible through IP networks, which are susceptible to attacks that steal money or affect the delivery of client services. Both can result in serious losses. It used to be that a bank’s assets were as secure as its vault. Today, financial enterprises need a way to protect their assets from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, known vulnerability attacks, encryption attacks, and impersonations. Read more »

Operators have learned some very hard lessons rolling out 3G networks and are looking to avoid making the same mistakes with their new 4G/LTE networks. 3G is often referred to, in confidence, by network engineers at the large operators as “the best effort network,” due to its rigid and inflexible nature. 3G was not properly specified and, more pointedly, a lot of equipment supplied by vendors has proved unsatisfactory in providing operators with the tools to properly handle the rapid increase in data and video traffic. Read more »