Keysight NOVUS-S 10/25GE8SFP28 High-Density 100/50/25/10GE Load Module

Evolve your high-speed multi-rate ethernet testing, and enables 5G RAN transport validation

The new 5G flexible RAN architecture introduces the Ethernet-based fronthaul for carrying time-sensitive radio data over switched networks. The new Keysight Novus-S 10/25GE8SFP28 load module provides the right mix of required interface speeds, time-sensitive networking (TSN) capabilities, and high-scale control and data plane traffic to validate these networks.

Network equipment manufacturers (NEMs) are rapidly developing multi-rate switch/routing devices for 5G fronthaul network to capture market share. These products are expected to support high data rates while meeting the demands for time-critical radio data over Ethernet.

Bandwidth requirements for enterprises, cloud service providers, and global data centers continue to grow rapidly. Cloud service providers and hyper-scale data centers are deploying high-density 100GE, 50GE, and 25GE networking infrastructure solutions to meet these demands.

As data centers, cloud service providers, and large enterprises implement this same high-density network equipment in their own networks, they too need the same type of test solution to verify performance and functionality before deployment.

Key Features

• Multi-vendor interoperability of 100GE, 50GE, 25GE, and 10GE testing between different speeds that run over these optics and media: Pluggable optical transceivers, active optical cables (AOC), and passive copper direct attach cable (DAC) media.

• 8x25GE, 8x10GE SFP28 interface speed support across all the ports of the load module with the pluggable QSA56 adaptors. The adaptors are included with the load module.

• Optional, dual-speed, 8x100GE, and 8x50GE QSFP28 support across all the ports of the load module for multimode 100GBASE-SR4, single mode 100GBASE-LR4, 100GBASE-CR4 passive copper, multimode 50GBASE-SR, single mode 50GBASE-LR and 50GBASE-CR2 passive copper.

• Ability to read and write SFP28 or QSFP28 transceiver registers and to export the transceiver register information to a csv file.

• Line-rate hardware packet capture and decode tools to detect and de-bug data transmission errors.

• An excellent test platform for full line rate 100GE and 50GE speed support over QSFP28 and 25Gb/s or 10Gb/s over SFP28 to evaluate hardware switch fabrics with NRZ encoding.

• Benchmark the data plane and protocol emulation performance and scale of ultra-high-density 100/50/25/10GE-capable network equipment; use industry-standard RFC benchmark tests in large test beds with many ports in a single test.

• Support for advanced features such as: Ethernet Forward Error Correction both RS-FEC and FCFEC, auto-negotiation, and link training on 100GE, 50GE, and 25GE speeds.

• Coherent optical transceiver support for optics with up to 4.5 watts of power consumption in all front panel ports of all the Novus QSFP28 load modules.

• Medium to high-scale L2/3 protocol emulation to validate performance and scalability of L2/3 routing/switching and data center test cases using Keysight’s IxNetwork application.

• Support for TSN Frame preemption (802.1Qbu / 802.13br), Time aware shaper (802.1Qbv) and a variety of 1588v2 profiles.

• Application support including:  IxExplorer, IxNetwork, and the related Tcl and REST API and other automation APIs.