Aug 14 2014
Ixia announced new 100GbE High Speed Ethernet transceiver interfaces on its XcellonTM-Multis and Xcellon-Lava portfolio of products. With the industry’s first QSFP28 adapters and the first native QSFP28 and CFP4 load modules based on the 4x25Gb/s electrical interface, network equipment manufacturers can now test their new ultra high-density 100GbE network devices in order to speed time to market, all while ensuring a seamless networking experience.
Bandwidth requirements for enterprises, service providers and global data centers are growing daily, and 10 and 40GbE technologies are straining under the demand. Service providers and data centers are looking at high-density 100GbE networking infrastructure solutions to meet these demands, and equipment manufacturers are rapidly increasing port densities to match. With Ixia’s new support for CFP4 and QSFP28 transceivers, equipment manufacturers can use Ixia’s high-density 100GbE load module to assist the move from four or eight 100GbE ports per blade to up to 32 ports. For data centers this means a more efficient use of facility resources, reducing rack space and power consumption per port – all while delivering greater network bandwidth.
With support for a CFP to QSFP28 interface adapter on Xcellon-Lava and CFP4 and native QSFP28 interfaces on Xcellon-Multis, Ixia’s solutions:
- Perform multi-vendor interoperability between different QSFP28 and CFP4 optical transceiver solutions, and cable media such as Active Optical Cables.
- Conduct stress tests to determine error-free network data transmission with long-term stability and high reliability.
- Detect and de-bug errored data transmission using 100Gb/s line rate packet capture and decode tools.
- Provide an excellent test platform for 100GBASE-SR4 and 100GBASE-LR4 100GE ASIC designs, FPGAs and hardware switch fabrics at full line rate 100Gb/s.
- Benchmark the data plane and protocol performance of ultra-high density 100GbE network equipment using industry standard RFC benchmark tests in 100GbE test beds with hundreds of 100GbE ports in a single test.
Industry commentary
“Enterprises and service providers are expecting 100GbE technologies to carry the large amounts of data needed to enable cloud computing and deliver on the promise of Software Defined Networking,” said Robert Coenen, Silicon Photonics Business Development Manager at Intel. “Using Ixia’s Xcellon solutions has helped us to accelerate time-to-market for Intel® Silicon photonics products by providing an important validation step on the path to broad data center adoption.”
“There’s a high expectation placed on new networking technologies, and network equipment manufacturers must not only innovate quickly to meet these demands, but also engineer high-quality solutions,” said Charles Seifert, Senior Product Manager, Ixia. “Ixia remains steadfastly dedicated to providing first-to-market and industry-leading network test solutions that help our customers develop next-generation High Speed Ethernet technologies. Ixia’s rapid development of these next generation CFP4 and QSFP28 100GE high density interfaces is the next step for network equipment manufacturers to deliver those solutions.”