Testing Wireless Networks Featured Article

Ixia, a provider of converged IP network test solutions, announced that Mellanox (News - Alert) Technologies picked the K2 High Speed Ethernet or “HSE” test solution to verify the throughput of their ConnectX-2 EN Ethernet Network Interface Cards or “NIC (News - Alert).”

The increase in internet traffic has had significant impact on data center. Data transfer between information consumers and information sources, and between many virtualized components, has increased rapidly.

Previously data centers used to aggregate 10 Gbps links. According to Ixia (News - Alert) officials, these methods complicate data center topologies and cause to incur huge expenses because they are costly and extremely labor-intensive. The company thinks it is essential for data centers to have single, higher-speed links.

“The bandwidth necessary to support data center applications and traffic is immense, and continues to grow. Conversely, tolerance for data center size, power, and cost continues to diminish,” Amit Krig, senior director of engineering at Mellanox Technologies, said.

The next generation NIC from Mellanox is designed for high-performance data centers using multiple HSE links, handling more than 1.5 terabits per second, company officials said.

As their HSE solutions evolved, the company needed a field-tested product that can generate the amount and types of traffic necessary to really stress their next-generation 40GE NICs. “Ixia's solutions perform at our high standards,” Krig said.

Mellanox picked Ixia's solutions to replace their in-house, industry-grade partial-load solution.

ConnextX-2 EN NIC from Mellanox is ideal for converged fabrics in enterprise data centers, clustered computing, and embedded environments that benefit from high bandwidth, low latency interconnect efficiency, company officials said.

Ixia's K2 and 10 GE solutions rapidly scaled to Mellanox's traffic demands, checked protocol conformance, generated layer 4-7 traffic, and accurately measured latency, loss, and jitter in real time, company officials said. “Ixia's K2 HSE solution was the best option able to sufficiently stress the ConnextX-2 EN NIC and demonstrate its next-generation abilities,” they added.

Victor Dembovsky, vice president of sales at RDT Systems, Ixia's exclusive distributor in Israel, Russia, and CIT, said Ixia was first-to-market with an HSE test solution, and has field-proven its value over and over.

“Mellanox's evolving ConnectX-2 EN Ethernet NICs demonstrate the direction that data centers are heading -- massive throughput of diverse traffic mixes, with low   latency, jitter, and packet loss,” Dembovsky added. “Their adoption of Ixia's K2 product and    testing applications is further proof that Ixia and RDT will rise to the challenges of the evolving data center.”

Recently Ixia announced a next-generation testing architecture called Xcellon, that “breaks the terabit traffic generation barrier for testing evolving media-rich networks,” TMCnet reported.