May 3, 2006 Calabasas, CA -- Ixia has launched its "flagship" Optixia network test platform, which consists of a family of chassis and network interface modules. The company says the system's optimized hardware engine enables it to flexibly create and transmit any type of Layer 2-3 traffic patterns at up to line rates over a network, while correspondingly receiving and analyzing the traffic.
The company contends that, for stateless traffic testing, Optixia systems are 2x more scalable than that of the closest competitor for Gigabit Ethernet, and more than 30x more scalable for 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) systems. The company says that the platform's integrated stateful traffic and application testing results in a comprehensive system for testing the performance and functionality of complex network devices, systems, and applications from Layers 2-7.
The company maintains that one of the biggest challenges in creating network traffic to stress a system realistically is to produce custom flows or "streams" that emulate specific but arbitrary traffic patterns that occur in real-world networks. Each flow may correspond to a different end user (i.e. IP address), tunnel (i.e. MPLS label), traffic type (i.e. QoS level) etc.; according to the company, these flows must be individually tracked for metrics including throughput, packet loss, latency, jitter, and sequencing to execute a test and determine device/system defects and limitations.
To meet such requirements, Ixia says that testing systems must be able to create and analyze this unique traffic "on the fly" at up to the line rate of the network; the company says its Optixia test systems support such flexible traffic creation and analysis over networks up to 10 Gbit/sec.
According to the company, when specific, non-contiguous addresses are required for the most realistic testing, Optixia supports: over 140,000 transmit flows per Gigabit Ethernet and OC-3/12 ATM port; and over 2 million transmit flows per 10 Gigabit Ethernet and OC-48/192 POS port.
Also according to the company, Optixia systems can track: over 131,000 receive flows per Gigabit Ethernet and OC-3/12 ATM/POS port; and over 2 million receive flows per 10 Gigabit Ethernet and OC-48/192 POS port.
The company contends that such scalability is unmatched in the IP performance test industry, resulting in reduced test resource requirements during large system-level testing.
Ixia notes that the recent IxOS 4.10 release of its testing-optimized operating system introduces further flexibility to the ability of Optixia systems to create and analyze test traffic, including: the ability to chain different user-defined fields within packets, allowing greater amounts of data to be customized together; and doubling the number of receive flows on ATM interfaces to 131,000.