Network Emulator II—Ethernet 10GE, 1GE, and 100MB Impairment

10GE, 1GE, and 100MbE Ethernet Impairment Emulation

Problem: Knowing How Networks and Devices Will Behave Under Worst-Case Conditions

Effective testing requires a real-world environment that reproduces realistic network conditions and behavior. All software and hardware should be subjected to a realistic test environment prior to deployment.

Solution: Real-world network impairment testing

Network Emulator II is a precision test instrument for 10GE, 1GE, and 100MbE Ethernet impairment. The device allows users to accurately emulate the real network conditions that occur over live production LAN/WAN networks. By emulating realistic and worst-case network conditions in the lab, users can validate and test performance of new hardware, protocols, and applications to prevent failures in production networks. The Network Emulator II offers a rich feature-set to allow testing in a controlled lab environment with repeatable and predictable impairments. Network Emulator II enables user to:

• Test the effect of delay on the network and application performance

• Determine how applications will perform when distributed across data centers

• Test data center backup in a real-life environment

• Cause outage and degrade scenarios to trigger and validate fail-over protection

• Combine with IxNetwork, IxLoad, and BreakingPoint test systems to create a complete test environment that includes real-world impairments

Highlights

Emulate real-world networks in the lab

• Enables validation, performance, and interoperability testing

• Test products and applications to characterize end user experience under real-world conditions

• Precisely reproduce and quickly resolve issues occurring in the field

Key features

• 10GE / 1GE / 100MbE impairment emulation

• 8 Port FPGA hardware architecture allows 100 % line-rate performance

• Single hardware platform for both Ethernet and Fibre Channel

• Test mixed speeds at the same time with one device • Flexible resource management

Key features

• Industry’s highest port count Ethernet FPGA emulator with 8 Ethernet ports

• Supports 10GE, 1GE, and 100MbE Ethernet impairment

• FPGA hardware-based architecture provides maximum precision and accuracy

• Dual banks with 4 ports each and dedicated FPGA processors per bank ensure high performance

• Fibre Channel 16G, 8G, 4G, and 2G also supported with additional software licenses

• Flexible Resource Management enables allocation of resources as needed by allowing:

o Automatic or manual memory allocation

o Allocation of profiles

o Bandwidth flexibility in Ethernet mode, enabling 10G on 4 ports at line rate or 8 ports sharing bandwidth of 11G per bank

• Precisely emulates delays and impairment that exist in Ethernet networks

• Stresses systems with controlled bit errors and frame drops

• Dynamically increases impairments to test failure recovery mechanisms

• Transparent to any higher-layer L2/7 protocols

• Optical media physical layer clock transparency for SyncE support

• Test automation via RESTful Web API, allowing control by TCL and languages such as Python

• ETHERNET+ features

o IP fragmentation

o Packet Capture and Replay