FCoE/FC Switch: Overview
Fibre channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and Fibre Channel (FC) switches are responsible for the overall performance of the converged data center. The next generation data center will carry various technologies over a converged 10GbE link, and data center operators expect the switches to be high density, high throughput, ultra low latency/jitter, and be able to bridge the FCoE network to the native fibre channel infrastructure.
Testing FCoE/FC switches requires a truly unified and high density test platform that is able to characterize the performance of FCoE traffic forwarding, FC traffic forwarding, TCP/IP traffic forwarding, and real storage I/Os.
Ixia: The only unified test platform for converged data centers.
Ixia's IxNetwork application, part of Ixia's broader data center test solution, delivers an end-to-end test environment to measure the throughput, latency, jitter and congestion management performance of a high density FCoE/FC switch. FCoE and FC interfaces manage congestion differently, and IxNetwork provides the tools and statistics required to monitor and verify both the flow control mechanism on the FCoE ports and the buffer-to-buffer credit mechanism on the FC ports, all in the same test.
Ixia's IxNetwork product family emulates data center Bridges, FCoE switches and FCoE/FC end-stations. IxNetwork gives the user highly granular control of state machine operations, error injections, and highly customized converged traffic generation and analysis capabilities. IxNetwork supports the FC-BB-5 FIP/FCoE specification, lossless Ethernet features such as priority-based flow control (PFC) and data center Bridging exchange (DCBX), and a thorough implementation of native fibre channel from the FC-1 layer up.
Leverage the powerful capabilities of IxNetwork over the industry's highest density 2/4/8G fibre channel and 1G, 10G, 40/100G Ethernet load modules to fully load your switch and assess switch performance at scale. IxNetwork is designed to:
- Test functionality, conformance to standards, and performance of FCoE/FC switches
- Verify robustness of the switch when receiving erroneous conditions and negative events from the FCoE and FC end stations
- Compare how different traffic patterns impact forwarding performance
- Thoroughly test the congestion management capability on both the FCoE interfaces and the FC interfaces
- Validate lossless delivery of business critical traffic with lossless Ethernet capabilities
- Quantify FCoE/FC switch throughput
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