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Ixia Powers New Series of EANTC and Light Reading 100 Gigabit Ethernet Tests

Test Background

Ixia Powers New Series of EANTC and Light Reading 100 Gigabit Ethernet Tests

Fixed and mobile packet networks worldwide experience sharply increasing traffic, driven by video applications, mobile data, and business services. Carriers, application service providers, and content distributors have been waiting for faster interfaces to become available. As the networking industry is about to enter the world of 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GE), EANTC and Light Reading are setting up a public test program aimed to provide operators with an unbiased, empirical view of the 100GE systems coming to the market. In the open test program, EANTC is going to validate the performance, service scalability and power efficiency of the new router interfaces.

Test Objectives

EANTC and Light Reading turned to Ixia to provide a testing solution that could validate various vendors 100GE products. These tests are aimed at producing comparative results that demonstrate:

  • BASELINE TESTS
    • RFC 2544 throughput and latency test across the backplane (100GE to 100GE)
    • RFC 2544 throughput and latency fan-out (10x 10GE to 100GE)
    • Similar IP multicast traffic scenarios
  • SERVICES
    • RSVP-TE scalability - Router's ability to act as an MPLS Label Switched Router (LSR)
    • Layer 3 VPNs scalability - Scaling up the VPNs
    • Virtual Private LAN Services (VPLS) scalability - Validating forwarding performance for Layer 2 multi-point services
    • Quality of Service - Testing MPLS-based prioritization under congestion
  • ENERGY EFFICIENCY
    • Measurement of the energy consumption in accordance with standards.

In addition, two individual test cases can be included for competitive differentiation (whenever feasible).

Test Configuration

The test pitted vendor equipment against Ixia's K2 100GE testing solutions. The following configuration were used for all test cases:
  • L2 IMIX: 9:64, 2:576, 4:1400, 3:1500
  • L3 IMIX: 9:46 (IPv4)/52 (IPv6), 2:558, 4:1382, 3:1482.

Test Results

This EANTC-led, industry-first set of benchmark tests provides carriers, data center managers, and application service providers with a detailed insight into various Higher Speed Ethernet (HSE) products using a consistent test methodology via Ixia's 100GE testing solution. The first in this series of tests took place during May and June, 2011.
The first two sets of results, from ZTE and Alcatel Lucent, are available at Light Reading's site