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 Catalyst 6500 is not only Cisco’s most successful product with more than 700,000 systems sold, but the industry’s most widely-deployed enterprise Ethernet campus/data center switch. 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. 
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Whether buying a house in the country, renting a bungalow in Bora Bora, or running a network, you’ll want one with a view. The ability to quickly and easily see how your network is performing is one of the most critical factors in ensuring a quality end user experience.
 
Successful service providers, enterprises, and government agencies all seek innovative technologies that can bring efficiency and competitiveness. These technologies enable bandwidth-hungry services such as voice over IP (VoIP), video, and enterprise applications that introduce potential network bottlenecks, which must be isolated and corrected.
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Now that the IEEE 802.3ba is a ratified 40/100GE standard and commercial hardware products are available, service providers and enterprises are beginning to deploy higher speed Ethernet (HSE) networks to capture the promise of extreme scalability, performance, and cost-effectiveness.

We’ve seen many of our network equipment manufacturer (NEM), service provider, and enterprise accounts turn to Ixia’s HSE test solution over competitive products. Today’s success of our HSE solutions is a culmination of many years of research, planning, development, and thought leadership. Over the past four years, Ixia has played a major role in the definition and deployment of HSE. Read more »

Software as a service (SaaS), an on-demand software delivery model that centralizes data and hosting in the cloud, has become mainstream because it saves companies time and money, and reduces CapEx. Touting similar benefits, testing as a service (TaaS), is quickly becoming a weapon in the arsenal of the over-extended IT departments and test labs responsible for verifying device and network performance, and service quality. Read more »

Following is a list of new features and functions that will be available this month for Ixia’s IxN2X software and hardware products.
New hardware features include: Read more »

A year ago this month at Ixia’s iSimCity testing facility, the Lippis Report launched round one of its public tests of top-of-the-line 10/40GE data center devices to measure performance and power consumption. The third round of testing is now complete and comprises the first-ever evaluation of 40GE switches. The data center cloud 10/40GE fabric test was free for vendors to participate and open to all industry suppliers of 10/40Gbps switching equipment. Ixia’s synopsis describes the test equipment used and the test coverage, along with the top 10 findings from the testing. 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 »

Available this month, IxNetwork 6.20 adds support for new infrastructure and protocol features. The main target of the release is to implement key protocol features and add support for Xcellon-Lava 40/100GbE Load Modules.
Following is a complete feature list per segment for IxNetwork 6.20 EA: Read more »

As part of its continuing evolution in automation, Ixia has forged two strategic partnerships with industry leaders - QualiSystems and ONPATH Technologies. QualiSystems is a leading provider of lab management, device provisioning, and test automation software. Their TestShell™ software enables centralized lab control, monitoring, and automation over a diverse array of lab equipment. ONPATH is a leading provider of scalable connectivity and monitoring solutions. Their Universal Connectivity System™ delivers an advanced platform that effectively rewires and reconfigures your lab as necessary to execute different tests. Read more »

Should server blade vendors be concerned with the software applications their customers are delivering? Conventional wisdom says no - just design the hardware to maximize performance on traditional axes: maximum compute power and maximum IO between CPUs, memory, network, and storage. But often surprises are found after hardware is in the field because designers don't anticipate how their customers intend to use the product. Trying to simply maximize hardware performance across all data paths can fail to address the key bottlenecks and issues that manifest themselves with emerging, rapidly evolving cloud computing use cases.  Read more »

MPLS has come a long way since its original goal to allow core routers to switch packets faster using a simplified header. MPLS is now a foundation of IP-based networks, providing value-added services such as traffic engineering and VPN services. The success and familiarity of MPLS in the core is driving service providers to deploy MPLS beyond the core network and into access, aggregation, and backhaul networks to support broadband, business, and mobility services. With active development in standards bodies, MPLS is also emerging as an industry standard to enable connection-oriented packet transport with MPLS-TP. Read more »

As Ethernet and IP continue to win the battle for transport and networking technology there are challenges in migrating legacy services and building new converged services leveraging these lower cost-per-bit networks. One of the significant gaps is that native Ethernet does not have an embedded timing distribution capability, which is required for certain applications. Examples of the need for precision timing include: Read more »

Because Wi-Fi access was viewed as non-mission-critical in the past and the network often saw relatively light use, Wi-Fi networks were optimized for coverage, rather than capacity and service quality. In modern offload networks, however, service providers are using Wi-Fi networks as an extension of their 3G/4G networks. Read more »