Napatech and Spirent Communications demonstrate 40G Virtualized Data Centre Performance at Interop 2011

As more applications migrate to the cloud and are accessed by a variety of mobile devices, there is a need to expand data center capacity in a cost effective and flexible way. This is driving the adoption of 40 GbE and virtualization. However, understanding the performance and scale limitation on these high speed data center environments is critical to deploying new services.

“With applications moving to the cloud and traffic needs increasing, the ability to test virtual environments at 40G will be crucial,” said Jeff Schmitz, vice president, Networks & Applications at Spirent. “Testing with Spirent allows enterprises to identify, test, and analyze the performance of physical and virtual network elements at 40 GbE scale.”

The demonstration will feature Spirent TestCenter with HyperMetrics 40/100G test modules as well as Spirent TestCenter Virtual which validates the performance and scale of multiple virtual test machines established in virtual servers at 40 GbE line rate. Napatech’s recently announced NT40E2-1 provides full 40 GbE packet capture of burst traffic, which can be distributed to the available virtual machines on a per port, protocol, flow or service basis based on Napatech’s VMware support.

“Virtualization provides a number of benefits for network appliance vendors”, stated Henrik Brill Jensen, CEO, Napatech. “It allows multiple network appliance applications to run on a single server, with each appliance running in its own tailored virtual environment. This in turn allows legacy and new applications to be run side-by-side. The data captured by the NT40E2-1 on a single 40 GbE port can be intelligently distributed to multiple virtual machines”.

Spirent TestCenter Virtual, used by cloud service providers as well as data center operators and hardware vendors like Napatech, provides unsurpassed visibility into the entire data center infrastructure, accurately benchmarking and optimizing performance of virtual server switches and cloud-based virtualization.

The Napatech NT40E2-1 is the first 40 GbE network adapter on the market with intelligent features that allow frame decoding, intelligent flow detection and distribution to up to 32 CPU cores, which can off-load and accelerate the performance of network appliances. The latest capability to be offered by Napatech is virtualization support allowing several monitoring applications running on virtual machines to share data captured at line rate by one or more Napatech network adapters.