New Ixia test equipment targets low-latency applications

New test equipment from Ixia, announced today, is designed to help telecom equipment manufacturers and service providers measure latency performance—a capability that has become increasingly critical as financial industry customers demand ultra-low latency connectivity and as more enterprises move to distributed data centers.

“People want to understand the impact [of latency] on end-to-end applications and how it impacts the user experience, said Dean Lee, Ixia director of product management, in an interview with Connected Planet.

Ixia now offers a traffic and impairment generation module dubbed ImpairNet and an accelerated performance load module dubbed Xcellon-Flex. Both modules use a single integrated chassis to simulate data center clouds.

By using Ixia’s new offering, equipment testers eliminate the need to use 50-kilometer fiber spools to simulate a network connection, Lee explained. “Our tool can replace that and simulate delay by distance,” he said.

WAN optimization and acceleration
Lee noted that a service provider might use the Ixia equipment to document a problem with a particular vendor’s edge router. If, for example, bit error problems were to hit a packet header that controls traffic flow and routing, it could create unpredictable behavior on the router, Lee said.

Lee added that the Ixia equipment could be useful in testing a wide range of products, including aggregation and termination devices, broadband access systems, video servers and other devices that carry services end to end. Another potential application for the product is to test the performance of a new breed of WAN optimization or acceleration devices, Lee said.

Product details
The Xcellon-Flex 10/40 GE Accelerated Performance load module includes 16 ports of 10 GE and four ports of 40 GE in a single slot with mixed-speed operation, multi-core CPU aimed at accelerating Layer 2-7 performance, Port CPU/memory aggregation, and automation support for data center cloud traffic and protocols, Ixia said.

The ImpairNet test module includes four 1 GE or four 10 GE ports on a single XM module, line rate impairment on all frame sizes, latency simulation at 600 ms for 10GE and six seconds for 1GE, and integrated traffic and impairment generation, said Ixia.