April 14, 2005 Palo Alto, CA -- Agilent Technologies has introduced a conformance test suite for MEF9, the first test specification officially ratified by the Metro Ethernet Forum. The MEF9 specification allows subscribers of Ethernet services to verify that a metro Ethernet network will support new types of Ethernet-based services.
The company says its N2X N5590A MEF9 Conformance Test Suite (CTS) incorporates more than 300 test cases for Ethernet private line (E-line) and Ethernet LAN (E-LAN) services, saving test engineers hours of programming in verifying that these services can be reliably delivered in a multi-vendor, multi-service environment. According to the company, network equipment manufacturers and service providers that already use the N2X platform to verify the performance of their multi-service network equipment can now also quickly check conformance to MEF9.
"MEF9 is a key industry specification for verifying service compliance at the User Network Interface," observes Bob Mandeville, president of Iometrix, an MEF-endorsed certification lab. "The news that test tools designed specifically for MEF9 compliance testing are coming to market will be welcomed by the testing, equipment vendor, service provider, and user communities alike."
According to the company, the N2X N5590A MEF9 enhances user productivity by:
* Saving test engineers months of engineering effort required to develop and maintain their own test applications.
* Providing a high-quality, independent validation tool, so that test engineers can focus on resolving implementation problems in the network equipment, instead of debugging the test setup.
* Enabling rapid completion of complex test plans for faster problem resolution and further regression testing as users' products evolve.
The company says the N2X platform is implemented in an easily extensible framework, enabling additional conformance tests to be added in the future.
"Carrier-grade Ethernet services are a natural extension of LANs into the carrier network, but they must also provide the service reliability and scalability of legacy ATM/FR services," concludes Dave Bass, vice president and general manager of Agilent's data networking division. "The N2X MEF9 conformance test suite significantly reduces the cost and time needed to verify new service capabilities in a very complex multi-vendor environment."
The platform will be demonstrated at Chicago's Supercomm 2005, in June.