Ixia Helps Huawei Validate Their Latest Super Core Router
Huawei, a leading global information and communications technology solution provider recently had the European Advanced Networking Test Center (EANTC) perform an independent performance validation on their newly announced 1T line card for their NE5000E core router. EANTC has a long standing relationship with the Ixia Marketing Lab Program and knew that they could count on the Ixia Xcellon hardware family as well as the IxNetwork software to execute the tests required for this validation.
The NetEngine 5000E cluster router is a super core router for use in the Internet backbone, metro cores, Internet data centers, and Internet bearing networks. This level of device can fully support the requirements of the next generation backbone network – including quality of server and operation capabilities. This is important to service providers as the demands of their customers grows in both quantity and quality expectations.
The focus of these tests was on the performance of the new line cards. Two variants of the LPUI-1T were used: the 8x100GbE and the 24x40GbE load modules. Each was tested individually using the same methodology of using ports on one blade as ingress and ports on a second blade of the same type as egress. The modules’ line rate performance was verified using RFC 2544 Throughput tests with frame sizes ranging from 128 – 9000, and also with an IMIX setup of IPv4 and IPv6 traffic.
Power efficiency measurements were also taken to show the impact of improvement on the new load modules. It is important that newer modules work at lower sustained power to reduce the cost of running the device.
Additionally the resiliency measurement for out of service time on an ISIS and on a eBGP failover configuration were measured. Lastly a forwarding information base (FIB) capacity test was executed multiple times, using a variety of different configuration options.
EANTC verified that the line card was performing to the values that Huawei has claimed. Test such as these are important to verify because service providers will want to see this Proof of Concept data in their typical Request for Proposal (RFP) documents as they look to evolve their networks.
For more information you can see the Huawei press release (http://pr.huawei.com/en/news/hw-329686-eantc.htm#.U1A62vldXTQ) and the report by EANTC (http://www.eantc.de/fileadmin/eantc/downloads/test_reports/2014/EANTC-Huawei-1TLPU-Marketing-Report_v1.4.pdf).
Additional Resources:
Huawei Press Release
EANTC Report
Ixia Xcellon Load Modules
IxNetwork
