Ixia enhances 100GbE visibility for service providers and large enterprises

Ixia (NASDAQ:XXIA) says it has added new capabilities to its Ixia Anue Net Tool Optimizer (NTO) portfolio of network visibility products that substantially extend actionable insight into complex, high-speed service provider and enterprise data center networks.

Networks continue to expand in complexity, scale, and bandwidth with the exponential growth of data traffic from mobile devices and applications. As service providers and enterprises roll out 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) networks, they need network visibility tools to provide the actionable insight required to meet performance expectations, the company says.

Ixia says the Anue NTO provides complete network visibility into physical and virtual networks, and allows large enterprises and mobile carriers to monitor the increasing number of 100GbE network ports with existing 1, 10, and 40GbE monitoring tools. This provides investment protection by ensuring that lower bandwidth monitoring tools can connect to higher-speed backbones.

The release of the Network Visibility Operating System (NVOS) v3.8 and the 100GbE Interface Module supports new capabilities that improve forensic analysis capabilities, advance application performance monitoring, and simplify security monitoring of 100GbE networks. This multi-speed monitoring capability helps companies preserve their previous investments in network visibility tools.

“With mobile data traffic forecast to increase by twelve times in the next five years, service providers and large enterprises will have to deploy 100GbE as the backbone of their networks,” said Iain Gillott, founder and president of iGR. “The challenge for the service providers and enterprises is to make the switch as cost effective as possible. The ability to upgrade existing solutions to 100GbE and maintain the same level of visibility is key in the industry-wide 100GbE adoption.”

The new 100GbE interface module and NVOS also provide advanced features that improve the ability to perform sophisticated data analysis, which boosts critical operational efficiencies.

The first of these is speed matching: The new 100GbE interface module and NVOS update protect monitoring tool investments by enabling users to perform packet-level monitoring of 100GbE networks at full line rate, using existing 1, 10, and 40GbE monitoring tools. Up to four 100GbE interface modules can be supported on one high-density Anue NTO device, or may be combined with 1, 10, or 40GbE ports in a single 2RU chassis.

Ixia supports what it claims is the industry’s largest load balancing capacity for monitoring, analysis, and security tools by enabling the use of limited-bandwidth monitoring tools in high-capacity environments. Customers managing 100GbE and other high-bandwidth networks can distribute and balance traffic across 32 individual tools, ensuring that each is not overwhelmed or under-used.

A new port-tagging feature on NVOS v3.8 offers improved forensic analysis capabilities, by tagging data packets upon ingress to the Anue NTO. In conjunction with existing precision time stamping features, this allows users to retain critical visibility into network events from a large number of monitored network segments.

The Ixia Anue NTO, including the 100GbE Interface Module and NVOS v3.8, will be on display at Ixia’s booth No. 1951 at Interop Las Vegas, May 7—9, 2013.

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