Can Testers Keep Up with Leading Ultra-low Latency Switches?
High-frequency trading corporations and other organizations that conduct time-sensitive transactions rely on ultra-low latency Top of Rack (ToR) switches in their data center cloud environments. The Dell’Oro Group says that ToR switches generated more than $500 million in revenues in 2010 with the sector growing 300% in Q2 alone. To take advantage of this growing market opportunity, leading infrastructure vendors are all “racing to zero” and trying to differentiate themselves by delivering the lowest possible latency performance.
So what’s the best way to validate performance? For switch manufacturers, thorough testing of throughput, latency and jitter is the only way to get quality products to market quickly. Hard performance numbers are also an ideal marketing tool: a clear way to demonstrate a competitive advantage. For data center operators, those hard numbers are equally invaluable as guidance for price vs performance purchase decisions.
In December 2010, Ixia hosted an open test event at iSimCity conducted by Lippis Enterprises. The goal was to provide the industry with comparative performance test data across 10GE switch providers including Force10 Networks, Alcatel, Brocade, Cisco Systems, Dell, Extreme Networks, and Juniper Networks. In addition, the event underscored the pressing need for test tools that provide an end-to-end solution and that outperform the industry-leading switches in terms of measurement resolution. Ixia’s solution provides a high level of measurement granularity – a resolution in the nanoseconds – to ensure accurate measurements at the performance limits of the world’s best switches.
To see a live demonstration of how Ixia is ensuring cloud performance by validating tomorrow’s ultra-low latency data centers, be sure to visit Ixia in booth #1367 at Interop. Ixia will showcase its comprehensive line-up of ultra-low latency testing solutions for the data center cloud, including the Xcellon-Flex Combo 10/40GE Accelerated Performance Load Module, IxNetwork software and the impairment generation module in a demonstration that puts Force10 Networks’ S4810 top of rack switch through its paces. Ixia’s new Xcellon-Flex 10/40GE load module generates both east-west and north-south traffic characteristic of data center clouds, and measures whether switches can satisfy forwarding performance requirements. At the same time, the new ImpairNet module simulates the latency that is inherent in the wide area network (WAN) between data center clouds to validate whether switching equipment can maintain ultra-low latency for time-sensitive applications, such as financial transactions, where even milliseconds of delay can results in millions of dollars of lost revenue.