Ixia Unveils New Data Center Testing Solutions

October 13, 2009 – Ixia has unveiled a new set of products for data center testing. Ixia’s new offerings are intended to enable equipment manufacturers, data center operators, and storage vendors to assess the functionality and performance of their Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE), Data Center Ethernet (DCE), Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), and SAN devices.

Ixia and Emulex have cooperated in the development of test methodologies for Converged Network Adapter (CNA) testing. CNAs are a key component of the combined Ethernet/Fibre Channel infrastructure. Used in virtualized servers, CNAs provide transparent access to Ethernet and storage network services.

“Ixia’s toolbox for device and system performance characterization in both the traditional and virtualized data center environments, allows users to optimize their data center configurations,” said Steve Daheb, chief marketing officer and senior vice president of business development, Emulex. “Using Ixia’s IxChariot, we were able to fully characterize our OneConnect Universal CNA (UCNA) functionality. Our collaboration on the Black Book for CNAs provides ready-to-deploy test methodologies.”

Next-generation data centers are rapidly adopting new techniques, such as server virtualization and network convergence to lower capital expenditure and operational costs. Data intensive applications and demands for permanent online storage have led to an explosion of network-available disk storage and related SAN devices.

To meet these rapidly growing needs, Ixia utilizes hardware and software components which apply and measure test traffic. Ixia’s data center test offerings address:

CEE/DCE/FCoE: The convergence of LAN and SAN traffic requires a multi-level testing approach, from the physical layer through FCoE protocols to lossless Ethernet. Ixia provides test offerings for CEE/DCE, as well as FCoE.
SANs: The increase of storage capacity delivered over converged networks requires that large-scale emulation be applied to SAN components: CNAs, FCoE initiators/targets, and SAN switches/arrays. IxSAN is designed to test performance and interoperability, without the need for large disk and tape farms.
Virtualization: Ixias IxVM is engineered to enable infrastructure performance benchmarking in virtualized data centers. IxVM leverages Ixia’s existing technology to generate test traffic from within the server infrastructure, determining a data center’s virtual infrastructure performance.