Ixia and The Lippis Report have announced the completion of the second round of a series of open industry data center network performance and power consumption tests.

To the industry, the tests are expected to provide a comparative performance and power consumption data across several 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GE) switch devices.

Touted as first of their kind, these tests are said to provide network stakeholders with real-world data that compares and contrasts different 10GE equipment manufacturer products for data center fabrics.

The testing is the first to adhere to the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS (News - Alert)) telecommunications energy efficiency ratio (TEER) standards, a comprehensive assessment that provides an accurate measurement of equipment’s energy efficiency.

Used Ixia's (News - Alert) Xcellon-Flex load modules, the testing evaluated the performance of the participating vendors' top-of-the-line 10GE data center devices.

“These industry tests are fundamental to understanding the performance, latency, and virtualization capabilities of 10GE and 40GE data center switches in conjunction with their power consumption,” said Nick Lippis, publisher of The Lippis Report.

Lippis said as Ethernet becomes the fabric for cloud networking, independent, repeatable, reliable, and comparable test results provide assurance to IT business leaders that they are acquiring equipment that will perform well in their specific deployment.

The testing took place at Ixia’s iSimCity proof-of-concept lab location in Santa Clara, California.

Tara Van Unen, senior manager for market development at Ixia, said that the company’s iSimCity enables companies such as The Lippis Report to test city-scale networking devices and infrastructure to ensure not only equipment performance, but also how the devices behave under real-world networks.

Additionally, Ixia and The Lippis Report also announced a new round of testing for fall 2011. The Fall round is expected to extend the testing methodology and include 40GE fabrics, additional test cases for benchmarking latency under different traffic conditions, equal-cost multi-path (ECMP) scalability, and buffering capabilities.