GL Communications Inc. announced today its enhanced next-generation Ethernet/IP Tester—the PacketExpert 10G—which supports comprehensive testing of both 10G and 1G Ethernet/IP networks.
Jagdish Vadalia, a senior manager for product development at the company, said PacketExpert 10G has two 10-Gb/s optical ports and two 10/100/1000-Mb/s electrical/optical ports and is capable of bit error rate testing (BERT), smart loopback, and RFC 2544 testing. In addition, PacketExpert 10G supports record and playback and simulation of IP links and impairments (with IPLinkSim). It also offers PacketBroker and Y.1564 (via ExpertSAM) test functionalities. “These tests are supported on each port independently for wire-speed Ethernet/VLAN/MPLS/IP/UDP testing,” he said. “BERT is implemented for all layers. RFC 2544/Y.1564 is applicable for layers 2, 2.5, and 3, and loopback is applicable for layers 2, 3, and 4.”
He added that the Wirespeed Record application supports capturing traffic on both the 1G and 10G ports at full line rate simultaneously without disturbing the link. An internal 8 GB of DDR3 memory allows capturing up to 8 GB of traffic (from both ports) at full wire speed (10 Gb/s or 1 Gb/s). “The captured traffic can be transferred to the host PC for offline analysis,” he said. Capture formats supported include PCAP, NGPCAP (popular Wireshark formats), DAT (GL proprietary raw format), and HDL (GL proprietary PacketScan format). The Wirespeed Playback application allows playback of canned traffic files (in PCAP/NGPCAP/DAT/HDL formats) over one or both ports at full 10-Gb/s rate, allowing real world conditions to be recreated in lab.
“IPLinkSim emulates a bidirectional IP WAN link with varying capacities from 10 Mb/s to 1 Gb/s for the electrical interfaces and up to 10 Gb/s on the optical interface,” he said. “This application can be used to test performance of applications that uses Ethernet /IP based transport such as web services, email, FTP, database access, enterprise networks, storage, cloud services, VoIP services, audio/video streaming, and so on. It offers an efficient and economical way to emulate terrestrial, wireless, Internet, satellite, or private network links.”
He added that the ExpertSAM application is used to validate Ethernet Service Level Agreements (SLAs) per the ITU-T Y.1564 standard. “It supports the two key Y.1564 subtests, the Service Configuration Test (SCT) and the Service Performance Test (SPT),” he said. “SLA parameters measured include the Throughput, Frame Transfer Delay (FTD), Frame Delay Variations (FDV), and Frame Loss Ratio (FLR) service acceptance criteria to validate the network path under test.” Up to 16 streams can be tested.
The PacketBroker application allows PacketExpert to capture packets at up to 10 Gb/s or 1 Gb/s) non-intrusively over Ethernet (electrical) and optical ports at nanosecond precision, he said. PacketBroker supports both Tapping (pass-through mode) and Tap-Filter-Aggregate-Modification modes.
And finally, he said, PacketExpert 10G includes a report-generation option to generate consolidated reports in CSV and PDF file formats. The reports include BERT statistics, Tx/Rx statistics, and Tx/Rx configuration details for each of the 10G ports.
http://www.gl.com/packetexpert-10g-optical-ethernet-tester.html
