Ixia’s IxLoad Used to Benchmark Carrier-Class Dell PowerEdge Server Line
Ixia, the leading, global provider of converged IP network test solutions, today announced that Dell, Inc. has selected Ixia as one of its key partners for performance testing on its PowerEdge server line. Dell’s PowerEdge series includes the large-scale blade servers used by service providers and enterprises for virtualized data centers, which require extensive benchmarking and testing.
Dell chose Ixia’s platform because of its ability to match the scale, performance, and flexibility necessary to test large rack servers. Ixia’s solutions thoroughly test high-capacity virtualized data center networks and storage infrastructures by addressing key challenges, such as service availability, infrastructure elasticity and provisioning, capacity, end-to-end application and services delivery, and performance across all layers. 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.
Ixia’s Xcellon-Ultra™ XT can handle the massive number of users serviced by large virtualized servers – numbers such as 24 million HTTP subscribers using up to 80Gbps of traffic throughput. The company’s IxLoad provides multiple 10Gbps interfaces that can emulate millions of subscribers performing real-world interactions with Internet and enterprise services. These test solutions emulate a wide variety of Internet, enterprise, and storage protocols found in today’s data centers.
The proliferation of cloud computing, as well as the delivery of numerous mission-critical enterprise and consumer-rich internet applications services, has increased both the virtual and physical infrastructure complexity and level of interactions among client, server, and storage components of 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. 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 quality of service (QoS) and quality of experience (QoE) to its users.
Ixia’s Performance benchmarking solution highlights:
- IxLoad tests application servers, traffic shapers, security devices, and other networking devices through real-world subscriber emulation that closely models user behavior over time, with the widest mix of protocols.
- The Ixia Xcellon-Ultra family is designed to meet the needs of modern data centers with city-scale emulation of clients. The XTS-series features line-rate encryption for use in wireless and security scenarios.
- Ixia’s IxNetwork application is used to test the protocols required in converged data centers that merge Ethernet and fibre channel traffic onto 10Gbps Ethernet networks, including FCoE, DCB, and PFC.