Test, verify and characterise performance, functionality and behaviour of Ethernet devices and network infrastructures from 10/100/GigE to 10Gig, 40G and 100G
Xena provides an extremely cost-effective and flexible professional Ethernet test infrastructure for load stress and functional testing of Ethernet equipment and network infrastructure.
With the world’s highest density and lowest power consumption per test port, Xena helps developers and providers of ethernet products and services face the challenge of GigE, 10G, 40G and 100G ethernet.
Two chassis product series are available supporting a complete suite of copper and optical Gigabit Ethernet and 10-Gigabit Ethernet modules. The 10-GigE interfaces include optical XFP, SFP+, and copper CX4. The GigE interfaces include copper 10/100/1000M Ethernet and optical 100/1000M Ethernet.
An open approach
The Xena test platform provides an open environment where traffic from any 3rd party software application or test suite can be fully transparently mixed with L2-3 traffic generated at wire speed.
A Vista/XP GUI client is provided for test execution, and remote management of test equipment located in multiple locations. In addition, an open text API accessed via TCP/IP allows users to script and automate testing from any software, tool environment, and test location.
Stream oriented traffic generation
Users can define and generate multiple transmit and receive streams with their own unique traffic profile. Each stream can generate 100k’s of unique traffic flows by using programmable packet field modifiers to increment or randomise field values such as IP addresses or VLAN identifiers, making it easy to scale your tests beyond the maximum performance parameters of your network or device. The stream rate can be defined as a percentage of line rate, frames per second, bit-rate, and the injection of packets can be controlled as a single-packet shot, number of packets, time duration, or in continuous mode. Traffic profiles can be defined as uniform or bursty, and custom packet editing is facilitated by a graphically driven field editor that allows the user to build any packet format, in addition to predefined packet templates for Ethernet, Ethernet II, VLAN, ARP, IPv4, IPv6, UDP, TCP, LLC, SNAP, GTP, ICMP, RTP, RTCP, STP, or fully specified by user.
Real time analysis and reporting
Packet flow statistics are tracked per stream, or per user defined filters which can include any combination of programmable field values. Incoming packet streams are automatically identified using optionally auto inserted Test Payload fields. Analysis of traffic throughput, latency, jitter, loss, sequence, and misorder errors is performed real-time per received stream with 16 ns resolution. Users can capture packets at wire speed on each port for detailed analysis, which in conjunction with event triggering and programmable filters provides a unique ability to identify and isolate performance issues.
API scripting from any tool environment
An open specification text based API allows the user to script for test automation purposes from any tool and scripting environment, only requiring that the scripting environment support text and line-based TCP/IP communication. Any changes made through the API are automatically reflected on the GUI. This unique and easy to use scripting-from-anywhere concept allows the user to access the Xena test platform from any proprietary or commercial scripting environment based on languages such as Tcl, Python, VBA, or Java development environments, using wrapper to convert from existing Tcl/Python/VB/Java APIs to the generic Xena API.
MS Excel program for test case execution, and reporting
As an alternative for GUI and script based test case execution, the user can configure, execute, and log statistics using a standard MS Excel program. The MS Excel templates provides by Xena use VBA to communicate with the test equipment using Xena’s TCP/IP scripting language, and is a very powerful means for operating the equipment for anyone familiar with standard MS Excel usage.
