Ixia Enables Service Providers to Benefit from OpenFlow

By Anshu Shrivastava, TMCnet Contributor

Recently, it was revealed that Ixia (XXIA) is now enabling service providers to fully benefit from the reliability and scale of standards-based software defined networking technologies, including OpenFlow.

The OpenFlow standard continues to develop and expand, thus it has become critical to have test tools available for development and pre-deployment testing, said Michael Haugh, senior market development manager at Ixia (News - Alert).

The earlier releases of OpenFlow provided companies with increased network insight, management and control. With the new v1.3 protocol, service providers are expected to gain increased value from the “greater scale, reliability and features available.”

The off-the-shelf, standards-based OpenFlow test solution IxNetwork has an expanded feature set, which will assist service providers in leveraging the power and control offered with OpenFlow v1.3.

Additionally, Ixia has expanded IxNetwork, letting users easily verify protocol conformance and fine-tune network designs prior to deployment. With IxNetwork, users can also test and validate network infrastructure and capacity and scalability, speeding application delivery across the network,

Ixia enables both enterprises and service providers to better validate OpenFlow networks via robust capabilities including increased control for modifying flow table entries and then generating traffic to test the forwarding using IxNetwork’s hardware-based traffic generation with a new control-plane function.

The company also provides the benefit of switch protocol conformance testing using IxANVL’s OpenFlow test suite, which includes approved test cases for Open Networking Foundation certification.

Additional capabilities are performance benchmarking for layer 2 and layer 3 learning capabilities via the new IxNetwork OpenFlow Quick Test and emulation of OpenFlow switches to test the functionality and performance of an OpenFlow controller.

“Ixia’s advancement of standards-based test solutions for OpenFlow will help us accelerate development of our partner ecosystem qualification to demonstrate readiness for and acceptance of enterprise-grade performance,” said Meena Sankaran, technical director at Big Switch Networks (News - Alert). 

By providing these intuitive OpenFlow test solutions, being an active member of the ONF, and serving as the chair for the Testing-Interop (News - Alert) Working Group, Ixia continues to contribute significant advances to the industry.

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