IxLoad® on Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Problem: Restricted View of Cloud Performance Puts QOS at Risk

Moving IT infrastructure to public clouds creates a model of shared responsibility between the customer and the cloud provider. This shared model eliminates the operational burden on the organization using cloud services, however, they are still responsible for the availability, performance, and management of all the controls and processes associated with operating over the cloud infrastructure. The move the cloud needs to deliver the same or better performance than the onpremises infrastructure.  Without a way to properly validate these cloud application workloads, customer quality of experience (QoE) is at risk.

Solution: A Flexible Application Testing Ecosystem for Cloud Infrastructure

Ixia’s IxLoad on AWS provides scalable real-world application performance testing in the public cloud. Build resilient cloud infrastructure you can rely on by using IxLoad to stress-test cloud architectures. Now cloud-enabled, the market-proven IxLoad application offers cost-effective, elastic, and sharable virtualized test capabilities that you can quickly deploy and scale across Amazon public clouds. Realize the savings of cloud without compromising performance by excising the unknowns that come with the elastic scalability, multi-tenancy, and high-availability characteristic of a cloud infrastructure.

Highlights

• Validate functionality of virtual and physical applicationaware devices such as firewalls, ADCs, storage servers, and applications

• Test converged multiplay services and application  delivery platforms

• Create realistic scenarios to validate subscriber QoE using unique and advanced subscriber modeling capabilities

• Assess how virtual machine (VM) mobility impacts application reliability and scalability

• Pinpoint and isolate application performance issues in the data center with flexible deployment of Ixia virtual test tools that can be easily moved, changed, or scaled up and down

• Validate NFV migration by testing within OpenStack-based private clouds

• Leverage subscription-based licensing for low startup cost and flexibility of pay-as-you-grow OPEX model

Key features:

• Emulates data, voice, and video subscribers and their associated protocols for high-scale performance testing 

• Delivers end-to-end testing of converged wireless and wired application delivery infrastructure  and services

• Unique and advanced subscriber modeling enables users to create realistic scenarios to validate subscriber QoE

• Common IxLoad user interface across both Ixia hardware and virtual products enables end-to-end virtual- and hardware-based testing from a single display

• Seeks test objective goals automatically, including concurrent connections, connection rate, simulated users, and throughput

• Ixia VM components (virtual chassis, virtual load modules) are software-optimized for stateful protocol emulation in virtual environments

• Flexible all-inclusive subscription licensing model reduces startup cost 

• Common licensing server shared among IxLoad VE, IxNetwork VE, and BreakingPoint VE

• Simple and fast deployment and orchestration using Ixia’s CloudFormation Templates

Application-layer protocols

 IxLoad delivers a wide variety of fully stateful protocols to emulate a complete multiplay user environment. Its sophisticated subscriber modeling capability enables users to replicate the dynamic nature of subscriber behavior. Ixia’s virtual chassis and load modules empower IxLoad to generate city-scale traffic. This, along with comprehensive network support, advanced test timelines, and automatic goal-seek finetuning to meet test objective, enables users to comprehensively assess the performance of their service delivery networks and determine application-level performance with a single integrated solution.