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FEATURE TEST & MEASUREMENT


What the Future May Hold for the Testing Industry The Test of Time Neil O’Sullivan spoke to Tara Van Unen, Director of Market Development, Ixia


NETCOMMS EUROPE: Why is testing so important for your customers?


Ixia builds test equipment for the development and system level testing of network equipment.


Its primary market has traditionally been equipment manufacturers, but over the last few years service providers and enterprises have become more heavily involved in pre-deployment testing.


TARA VANUNEN: From a service provider’s perspective, it’s a very competitive economy right now. They can’t afford to have network downtime or breach of Service Level Agreements. They want to know in advance that their performance is going to meet the expectations of their end users, before the service goes live. Building an entire lab of their own equipment and running trials is expensive, time consuming and unreliable. Our equipment will simulate thousands or tens of thousands of devices and millions of subscribers and all of the services, whether we’re surrounding a single device or a collection of devices. We can simulate the servers, all the services, the application, and all the subscribers that are connecting into that network. This is very powerful because it gives companies confidence in what they’re offering to their customers. One of the mandatory requirements


for any technology deployment or any network is to make sure that the different vendor devices can interoperate with each other. No network is totally homogeneous, using only one provider’s equipment. It is essential that Vendor A’s router or switch can talk to Vendor B. Having an industry standard does not ensure interoperability because there are details and specifications that are always left up to each vendor’s discretion. So there is always a need to troubleshoot interoperability before any deployment.


NE: How significant is the move to IPv6 going to be for the companies that you work with?


TVU: It is going to be very significant. We have run out of IPv4 addresses. We actually have a black market for IPv4 addresses now. I hear one company just paid $1.5 million for a block of IPv4 addresses. A lot of access networks aren’t ready to support IPv6 endpoints and the two protocols will coexist for a minimum of the next 10 years. That presents a big problem for the service providers in making sure their networks can handle both. There are short term strategies, such as tunnelling, which a lot of service providers are using because


36 NETCOMMS europe Volume II, Issue 1 2011


they are fast and enable them to offer both IPv4 and IPv6 support. Longer term, most service providers have indicated that they are going to a dual stack network. Here, every single device in the broadband access network, from the network layer to the applications, supports both IPv4 and IPv6. That is the ideal deployment scenario but there is a concern. You’re duplicating the number of protocols that have to be handled by devices that formerly only had to support v4 protocols and v4 forwarding tables and subscribers. It’s pretty processor-intensive for dual stack devices to do all that they are called upon to do and it is really important to have some benchmarking to understand how much these devices can handle.


NE: What other important technological shifts have had an influence on your work?


TVU: The proliferation of smart devices, and the fact that smart phones and mobile devices are being used to access bandwidth intensive video applications has major implications for the background infrastructure. No one ever envisioned that there would be these bandwidth requirements to support mobile devices. Many service providers can’t move to higher data rates using technologies like 3G and LTE because their backhaul network can’t support the bandwidth requirements. They have to provide entirely new TDM connections to add additional bandwidth, even if only a fraction of that connection is used by the client. This means that it is extremely cost prohibitive for them to move to 3G or LTE with a TDM infrastructure. All of the service providers I know have implemented or are implementing carrier Ethernet in their mobile backhaul. This is to support their mobile data traffic, so they can have a cost-effective way of handling such intensive services. Ideally, they would move over their


mobile voice traffic onto that same carrier Ethernet infrastructure, but they’re not doing that right now. They’re keeping all their mobile voice traffic on TDM because Ethernet doesn’t support the frequency timing synchronisation that you need in order to set out and handover voice calls. This situation,


where both the TDM for voice and carrier Ethernet for data have to be maintained, is not ideal. The ideal scenario is that they have one converged Ethernet infrastructure that can handle all the services. But before this can be done, companies are looking to have some reassurance that the Ethernet infrastructure can handle voice calls. This is where testing and benchmarking comes in.


NE: What is the timescale for the deployment of carrier Ethernet mobile backhaul?


TU: I think we’re still at the stage where people are asking if the technology is interoperable. A company might have a mobile backhaul with six different vendors. They will want to see some evidence that all these functionalities can work and that the devices can talk to each other. This has now largely been achieved, but before service providers will really jump on the bandwagon, they need to make sure that each device can carry the wire rate traffic and do all the operations, administration and maintenance for detecting failures in the network.


NE: What are the most important drivers for change?


TVU: Ultimately, the need for cost- savings drives change. With virtualisation, for example, you can consolidate your data centre by allocating virtual servers on demand and moving them around as required. This means that you can make some servers redundant and you don’t need to have them powered up and idling uselessly. Virtualised servers are much more energy efficient and it is also a much better model economically. The ability to converge both your LAN and SAN storage network on a single Ethernet structure is another opportunity for cost saving, as is Fibre Channel over Ethernet. Fundamentally, companies want to


explore these areas because it could result in a saving for them. But they can only be sure that they will work through rigorous pre-deployment testing and benchmarking.


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