Ixia Announces Fibre Channel over Ethernet Test Solution

Ixia will begin offering a testing solution for Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). The company also announced a partnership agreement with SANBlaze Technology Inc., a leading provider of storage solutions for embedded systems.


Ixia's data center Ethernet (DCE) testing solution provides functional, performance and scalability testing of Ethernet, FCoE and SCSI devices, in addition to application traffic such as rich media, inherent to storage area networks. Port density scales up to 96 10 GbE ports in a single chassis. The solution provides support for FCoE protocols, including priority flow control (PFC), enhanced transmission notification (ETS) and congestion notification (CN), all of which are required to transmit SAN traffic over Ethernet, or "lossless Ethernet."


Ixia said it also supports SCSI testing over FCoE, which provides real-world storage area network testing. Ixia ports can emulate tape drives, disk arrays and other native fibre channel storage devices, bridging the gap between native fibre channel and FCoE. Application support includes functional testing and high-scalability performance testing, as well as RFC test suites for validation of data center Ethernet performance.


Under the Ixia/SANBlaze partnership, SANBlaze technology for fibre channel target and initiator emulation testing is integrated on the Ixia IxYukon 10 GbE hardware platform.http://www.ixiacom.com