Ixia has enhanced its “Optixia” test platform with an optimized hardware engine that can create and transmit any type of Layer 2-3 traffic patterns at up to line rate over a network, and correspondingly receive and analyze the traffic.
Ixia said one of the biggest challenges in creating network traffic to stress a system realistically is to produce custom flows (sometimes referred to as streams) that emulate specific but arbitrary traffic patterns that occur in real-world networks. Each flow may correspond to a different end user (e.g., IP address), tunnel (e.g., MPLS label), traffic type (e.g., QoS level), etc. These flows must be individually tracked for metrics such as throughput, packet loss, latency, jitter, sequencing, etc. to execute a test and determine device/system defects and limitations. To meet such requirements, testing systems must be able to create and analyze this unique traffic on-the-fly at up to the line rate of the network. Optixia test systems support such flexible traffic creation and analysis over networks up to 10 Gbps.
Optixia supports:
- Over 140,000 transmit flows per Gigabit Ethernet and OC-3/12 ATM port
- Over 2 million transmit flows per 10 Gigabit Ethernet and OC-48/192 POS port
- Over 131,000 receive flows per Gigabit Ethernet and OC-3/12 ATM/POS port
- Over 2 million receive flows per 10 Gigabit Ethernet and OC-48/192 POS port
The recent IxOS 4.10 release of Ixia’s testing-optimized operating system introduces further flexibility to the ability of Optixia systems to create and analyze test traffic, including:
- Ability to chain different user-defined fields within packets, allowing greater amounts of data to be customized together
- Doubling the number of receive flows on ATM interfaces to 131,000
Ixia also noted that further interface density increases and ongoing functional depth enhancements will be rolled out on Optixia test systems in 2006.
http://www.ixiacom.com/products/optixia