SCENARIO
The adoption of cloud computing is being driven by the proliferation of rich internet applications, anywhere broadband access, and infrastructure elasticity enabled by virtualization. As consumers and enterprises become more dependent on services and applications running in the cloud, network performance becomes a key metric to ensuring end-user QoE and key service level agreement (SLA) requirements are met.
Proper handling of Ethernet traffic categorized as north–south traffic or east–west traffic is critical to data center performance—requiring a variety of testing and techniques. Individual components, sub-systems, and the data center, as a whole, must be tested to ensure dependable capacity, flexible performance, and high security.
Each area has specialized testing requirements:
• Virtualization – Assessing data center virtual infrastructure elasticity and capacity requires tools that can test in the context of an end-to-end environment, measuring the performance of virtual switches, firewalls, and servers, in addition to generating a diverse set of client–server, server–server, and server– storage application traffic originating from both within and outside of VMs
• IP CLOS fabric and ECMP – IP CLOS fabric with ECMP is critical to provide agility, flexibility, and high availability data center networks—fabric forwarding and failover must be tested thoroughly under scale
• Unified physical and virtual infrastructure for compute and storage – As data and applications are migrated to the cloud and leverage virtualized server infrastructures, it is essential to measure application performance through all stages—onpremises physical servers, VMs, and a fullyhosted cloud
• End-to-end service delivery – Measurement of end-to-end transactional latencies and application throughput across voice, video, and data applications is essential to ascertaining the collective impact that data center storage, network, and computer infrastructures have on end-user QoE
• Security – The increasing use of virtualized cloud infrastructures in enterprise and service provider data centers introduces unforeseen security issues that require comprehensive and continuous testing to detect and overcome
• Higher-speed, more bandwidth – Rapid expansion of intra– and inter-data center Ethernet traffic means that 40, 100, and even 400GE interfaces will need to be tested
IXIA SOLUTIONS
Ixia’s solutions address the testing challenges of application-aware devices and service-delivery infrastructures. IxNetwork validates data center underlay and overlay network infrastructure with rich protocol emulations from BGP, VXLAN, and FCoE to various technology innovations for software-defined data center networks.
IxLoad supports an extensive library of multiplay protocols, realistic subscriber modeling capabilities, and the industry’s highest application scale for assessing device under test/system under test (DUT/SUT) performance and end-user QoE.
BreakingPoint addresses application controller, application delivery, and deep packet inspection (DPI) requirements and key differentiators through the emulation of hundreds of applications, live malware, and user behavior.