Network testing solutions provider Ixia announced that Barefoot Networks, developer of high-performance, programmable switch solutions, has chosen its 100 Gigabit Ethernet test solutions to validate the Tofino series of programmable switches launched in June last year.
Barefoot’s Tofino switches are based on technology that is designed to enable a fully programmable Ethernet switch that does not suffer a performance penalty to its 6.5 Tbit/s traffic processing capability. To validate the performance, scale and quality of these switches, Barefoot test engineers can use Ixia’s IxNetwork and Novus 100 Gigabit Ethernet solutions to recreate real-life traffic patterns and load characteristics.
Ixia’s IxNetwork offers a complete chip, device and network infrastructure test solution that can be used to validate Layer 2/3 performance, interoperability and functionality. Capable of analysing up to 4 million traffic flows simultaneously, IxNetwork is designed to provide enhanced real-time analysis and statistics. Featuring eight native QSP28 100 Gigabit Ethernet ports, the Ixia Novus load modules can generate terabytes of data to simulate real-world network traffic and Layer 2/3 protocols.
In combination, the Ixia solutions provide a test platform designed to enable full line-rate 100 Gigabit Ethernet evaluation of application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) designs, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and hardware switch fabrics.
The joint solution showed how a DevOps approach can be used to triangulate performance issues to VMs and NICs in servers or network switches and thereby enable the detection of poorly performing virtual network functions (VNFs) in service chains.
- In January, Barefoot announced that it was sharing its Wedge 100B series switches, including the Wedge100BF-32X 3.2 Tbit/s 1 RU 32 x 100 Gigabit Ethernet and Wedge100BF-65X 6.5 Tbit/s 2 RU 65 x 100 Gigabit Ethernet switches that are based on its technology Tofino, with the OCP ecosystem.