Ixia's 100 GbE challenge

IP testing company Ixia used NXTcomm08 to showcase its 100 gigabit Ethernet proof-of-concept, alongside a new provider backbone transport and peer-to-peer platform. In conjunction with Avago Technologies and Infinera, Ixia's demo of a single-channel 100 GbE line-rate traffic generation and analysis had 100 GbE traffic transported between Los Angeles and the Las Vegas Convention Center.

“Convergence and a lot more video traffic and peer-to-peer traffic is driving the need for next-generation data centers, which will need next-generation plumbing,” said Atul Bhatnagar, CEO and president of Ixia. “Our goal is to show it is doable and to provide the tools in a very aggressive manner to meet all the needs of the service providers”

As the number of broadband and bandwidth-draining apps users continues to grow, backbone bandwidth maintained by major Internet carriers has expanded 75% to 125% per year. Ixia's philosophy is that all networks eventually will migrate to 100 GbE, so it wants to jump-start things. Bhatnagar said service providers need to begin building and testing platforms early to become video-, audio- and data-savvy.

“Our goal is to give enough tools to designers and testers that they can truly evaluate how efficient their system is as the load increases,” Bhatnagar said, adding that right now, the industry is still in the learning phase.