24 November 2003 Palo Alto, CA Lightwave --Agilent Technologies today announced that Extreme Networks has chosen the Agilent RouterTester 900 test system to verify the performance of its Ethernet Automatic Protection Switching (EAPS) capability, a new Internet specification that offers SONET-like protection switching for enterprise businesses and service providers offering metro Ethernet services. Using RouterTester, performance limitations can be identified quickly and cost effectively, enabling the development of highly scalable network equipment and services.
Extreme Networks worked with BT Exact, BT's research, technology and IT operations business, to verify its EAPS. BT Exact designs and delivers carrier-scale networks and offer practical experience to help telecom equipment manufacturers understand how their products will respond when used in typical live network environments. BT Exact's test plan called for simulating thousands of IP traffic flows from hundreds of thousands of customer networks. RouterTester 900 was chosen because its highly scalable routing-protocol emulation capability could fully stress Extreme's Summit fixed configuration Ethernet switches while accurately measuring sub-second recovery time and the latency and loss of each data packet.
"Using RouterTester 900, it was easy to rapidly simulate a large pool of routes, generate traffic on those routes, and graph the actual performance of user traffic flows in real time in the critical moments following recovery," said Michael Flaum, technical marketing manager at Extreme Networks. "Our customers can easily repeat this demonstration and be confident their deployment of our Ethernet switches will realize highly scalable and reliable IP services."
Protection switching is traditionally provided by SONET/SDH transmission equipment or specialized hardware to guarantee sub-second recovery from a network failure by switching to an alternate path around the fault. RouterTester 900's verification of EAPS is significant because the same performance was achieved using standard, off-the-shelf Ethernet interfaces.
Routing protocols are used by routers within a data network to share information about the network topology, enabling the forwarding of IP packets to the correct destinations. By emulating these routing protocols realistically, RouterTester 900 appeared to Extreme's switches as a 100,000-node network carrying traffic from thousands of users. RouterTester 900's efficient and realistic network simulation reduces cost of test and enables integration of innovative technologies.