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The Next Generation of Ethernet

With the push for a secure, virtualized and converged environment with almost zero loss and latency, the data center continues to be the focus of innovation.

What are the Key Development Issues for Data Centers?

For those responsible for creating and deploying the data centers of today and tomorrow, the challenges are clear. Will your solution:

• Support thousands of users while meeting service-level agreements?
• Forward bursty traffic at high bit rates without dropping frames?
• Handle flooded traffic and large Access Control Lists without affecting performance?
• Achieve the forwarding rates required by low-latency applications while maintaining throughput?
• Deliver lossless performance under congested conditions?
• Enforce effective security measures while maintaining throughput and latency thresholds?
• Maintain high availability even under adverse network conditions?
• Failover properly in the case of a disaster or outage?

Outages or poor performance can result in lost revenue or even lost customers. New technology and innovations can not only solve problems, but introduce them as well. The data center is not just a collection of protocols and components; it is a dynamic system with interdependencies. Validating each application or protocol individually will not predict how they will perform once deployed. The test bed must reproduce the complexity and scale of the production network.

Your solution must scale, whether in bandwidth or traffic type or number of transactions, users, sessions, ports, tunnels or VLANs, while maintaining throughput, QoS and security. If your test system does not deliver this level of realism, you cannot have the assurance that the system will perform in a real network. Spirent Solves Your Critical Test Challenges.

Tomorrow's data centers are being designed around virtualized services and converged networks. These designs set new standards for network performance and scale, service availability, system security, application Quality of Experience (QoE) and power efficiency, which are only validated by a holistic test architecture.

Spirent's holistic approach to validating the performance of data centers offers a unified Layer 2-7 test architecture specifically designed to test the end-to-end performance of 40/100 Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) convergence, virtualized server networking, cloud computing-based applications and security.