Infotech Lead India: Ixia’s latest offering, IxNetwork, is a standards-based OpenFlow test solution with an expanded feature set to help service providers harness the power and control offered with OpenFlow v1.3.
Now service providers can deploy OpenFlow and realize benefits that were previously available only to enterprises.
Service providers can take advantage of the reliability and scale of standards-based software-
IxNetwork comes packed with additional features such as support for MPLS and IPv6, which ensures faster delivery of services and an increasing return on technology investment. Ixia has expanded IxNetwork to allow service providers to verify protocol conformance and fine-tune network designs prior to deployment.
IxNetwork allows users to test and validate network infrastructure, capacity and scalability. It also offers increased control for modifying flow table entries and then generates traffic to test the forwarding using IxNetwork’s hardware-based traffic generation with new control-plane capability.
The solution also makes switch protocol conformance testing possible, using IxANVL’s OpenFlow test suite and performance benchmarking for layer 2 and layer 3 learning capabilities via the new IxNetwork OpenFlow Quick Test. It also emulates OpenFlow switches to test the functionality and performance of an OpenFlow controller.
Enterprises are already adopting the v1.0 protocol. Having provided the testing tools for this version of the OpenFlow standard, Ixia has acted quickly to enhance IxNetwork with the new v1.3 protocol.
Ixia plans to publicly demonstrate OpenFlow v1.3 protocols at the Open Networking Summit (ONS) taking place in Santa Clara, CA, on April 15-17.
Big Switch Networks will be leveraging the Ixia test system in their booth at ONS.
Meena Sankaran, technical director at Big Switch Networks, said,“Ixia’s advancement of standards-based test solutions for OpenFlow will help us accelerate development of our partner ecosystem qualification to demonstrate readiness for and acceptance of enterprise-grade performance.”
