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 »

Ixia has drawn on its industry expertise and experience working with global customers, industry forums, and test labs to predict the networking industry's top trends for 2012. We expect growth to come from data center, wireless, security, IPv6, and Carrier Ethernet deployments. Check out our predictions for the following technology areas: Read more »

In 2003 Netli created their Application Delivery Network (ADN). This is considered by many to be the earliest "cloud-based WAN optimization" service. Now, "The Cloud" is a household word, and is being used as a platform for many business-critical services.
In the performance management arena, new tools and approaches have been and are being developed to address this rapidly-growing market. Netli has since become Akamai, and other cloud providers have appeared on the scene including Internap, Cloud Leverage, Virtela, and Aryaka. Read more »

Integrating virtualization within a host and across a data center requires careful planning and thorough testing to ensure that the functionality, performance, security, and reliability of applications and data is not compromised. Virtualization removes the traditional silos between server, storage and network, making it critical to test in the context of an end-to-end environment. Read more »

The Lippis Report recently published the first test results of a series of open industry benchmarking tests on several 10GbE switches targeted for use in public/private data center clouds. Included in the newly published online report are comparative vendor measurements from the first round of testing. The following data center switch vendors participated in the first round of testing at Ixia’s iSimCity:
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