Scenario

The adoption of cloud computing is being driven by the proliferation of rich Internet applications, anywhere broadband access, and infrastructure elasticity enabled by virtualization. As consumers and enterprises become more dependent on services and applications running in the cloud, network performance becomes a key metric to ensuring end-user QoE and key SLA requirements are met.

To match increasing demand while minimizing CAPEX and OPEX, data centers must provide state-of-the-art services while lowering cost, power consumption, and design complexity. Blade servers supporting virtual machines (VMs) have become standard due to their ability to more-easily control computing resource allocation. On the networking front, LAN/SAN convergence, fueled by economical availability of 10GE networks, is significantly reducing both complexity and cost. 40GE and 100GE networks are starting to find their home in, and between, data centers.

Proper handling of Ethernet traffic, categorized as north-south traffic between clients and servers or east-west traffic between components of a distributed application, is critical to data center performance – requiring a variety of testing techniques. Individual components, sub-systems, and the data center as a whole must be thoroughly tested to ensure dependable capacity, flexible performance, reliable operation, and high security. Thorough and robust testing is the only way to ensure if a network’s evolution to cloud-based infrastructure is properly provisioned, and provides high QoS and QoE to its users.

Each area has specialized testing requirements:

• Data center compute/server infrastructure – as enterprises migrate their data and applications to the cloud and leverage virtualized server infrastructures, it is essential to measure application performance through all stages – on-premise physical servers, virtual machines, and eventually a fully-hosted cloud
• Network infrastructure andstorage – the convergence of LAN and SAN traffic requires
  a multi-level testing approach, from the storage network fibre channel over Ethernet networks – to the Ethernet switching infrastructure – to the convergence of the two with lossless Ethernet
• Virtualization – assessing data center virtual infrastructure elasticity and capacity requires tools that can test in the context of an end-to-end environment, measuring performance of virtual switches, firewalls, and servers, as well as generate a diverse set of client-server, server-server, and server-storage application traffic originating from both within and outside of virtual machines
• End-to-end service delivery – measurement of end-to­end transactional latencies and application throughput across voice, video, and data applications is essential to ascertaining the collective impact that data center storage, network, and compute infrastructures have on end user QoE
• Security – the increasing use of virtualized cloud infrastructures in enterprise and service provider data centers introduces unforeseen security issues that require comprehensive and continuous testing to detect and overcome
• Higher speed Ethernet – rapid expansion of intra- and inter-data center Ethernet traffic means that 40 and 100GE interfaces will need to be tested

Ixia Solutions

Ixia’s applications delivers scalable converged data center emulation and integrated traffic generation/wizard for performance testing of data center switches and converged network adapters (CNAs). Combined with the 32-port Xdensity 10G solution and FCoE/FC interfaces, Ixia offers a complete data center cloud simulation to validate switch throughput and low-latency performance.

Ixia’s solutions address the testing challenges of application-aware devices and service-delivery infrastructures. IxLoad supports an extensive library of multi-play protocols, realistic subscriber modeling capabilities, and the industry’s highest application scale for assessing DUT/SUT performance and end-user QoE.

Ixia’s IxLoad-Attack validates network security appliances – determining that they effectively and accurately block malicious attacks while delivering high end-user QoE for mission-critical applications.

Ixia BreakingPoint addresses the application controller, application delivery, and DPI requirements and key differentiators through the emulation of hundreds of applications, live malware and user behavior.

Ixia Virtualized Testing

Ixia’s IxVM is a family of products to validate the performance of virtual and physical data center infrastructures. It offers a unified product portfolio with the flexibility and breadth of applications required to assess the impact of virtualization across the data center. IxVM measures individual server performance, VM performance, the latency and throughput of virtual switches, and the effect of different operating systems on system performance. IxVM virtual ports provide a software-based version of Ixia’s traditional hardware ports. These ports are easy to deploy in a virtual environment, and allow quick scaling and test configuration changes.

Ixia’s virtualization testing solution offers a user-friendly interface to virtual ports management, which supports asset discovery through integration with popular virtualization platforms. The solution tests:

• Virtualized server capacity
• Service scalability and elasticity
• Virtualized switching and firewall performance
• Virtual desktop infrastructure
• Virtual or physical devices with a realistic mixture of application and data storage traffic using stateful L4-7 traffic generation
• IP protocol functionality and convergence in virtual environments, including QoS, VM migration, VLAN leakage, and IGMP group join/leave latencies using L2-3 protocol emulation and traffic
• I/O storage for CNA manufacturers

Suggested Ixia Applications and Platforms

Read More