Xcellon-Lava™ Dual-Speed, 40/100GE Higher Speed Ethernet Load Modules

The Xcellon-Lava 40/100-Gigabit Ethernet test modules are Ixia’s ultra-high performance and scale Higher Speed Ethernet (HSE) products. They incorporate the advantages of the Xcellon multicore processor architecture and provide mid-range 40GbE and 100GbE CFP, QSFP+ and CXP port density. Xcellon-Lava is a layer 1-7 measurement and analysis test solution that is supported by Ixia’s leading test applications, IxNetwork™, IxNetwork AppLibrary™, and IxLoad™.

Xcellon-Lava modules are essential for testing highdensity data center 40GbE and 100GbE network equipment for large enterprises, service providers, and carrier-class networks. Xcellon-Lava load modules are compatible with Ixia’s 12-slot rackmount and 2-slot chassis, and a broad set of Ethernet interfaces,  allowing real-world, layer 1-7 test and measurement  in a single chassis.

Two models are available:

• Xcellon-Lava Accelerated Performance 40GE and 100GE for layer 1-7 test

• Xcellon-Lava 40GbE and 100GbE Reduced Performance – an economical alternative to the Accelerated Performance load module. It is designed for testing layer 1-3 functionality that requires a high scale data plane feature set and a reduced scale and performance routing protocol emulation.

Since early in 2009, when Ixia released the world’s first 100GE CFP test port, much of the test challenges involved the development new electronics hardware, ASIC development, hardware/firmware integration, and new optical/copper transceivers and interconnect cables. Interoperability of network equipment quickly followed in 2010 and 2011, proving that the majority of HSE system vendor equipment worked well together and were ready for deployment. Xcellon-Lava continues to serve these types of applications very well.

HSE has moved into areas of the data center where the increased bandwidth of 100GbE interfaces is used to provide backhaul services for fixed and mobile networks that support many different subscriber services, each with large numbers of subscribers. Xcellon-Lava is designed to test the data plane, protocol and scale performance, and the quality of service on 100GbE links carrying extreme amounts of traffic with large numbers of protocol interfaces and subscribers per port.

Key Features

• Flexible interfaces for a broad range of 40GbE and 100GbE test cases:  CFP, QSFP+  and CXP

• 24 ports of 100GE CFP or 48 ports of 40GbE QSFP+ in single rack mount chassis  with Windows 7

• Compatible with the XGS2-SD and the XGS12-SD family of 2-slot and 12-slot chassis  with Windows 7

• Comprehensive layer 1-7 testing with integrated data plane and control plane traffic generation and analysis

• Multicore processor implementation for ultra-high-scale L2/3 routing protocol emulation 

• Independent, software-selectable, 40GbE or 100GbE speed per port

• Checks compliance and performance to IEEE-STD 802.3ba with a full array of statistics and real-time error indicators

• Injects and tracks errors in lane markers, 64/66b payloads, and synchronization bits with controls for different configurations of error injections

• Unframed layer 1 BERT support with individual PCS lane BERT test and error injection over a wide range of PRBS patterns, including standard MMF and SMF PMD support. A full set of BERT-related and bit error ratio (BER) statistics are available

• Per-port reservation for native CFP ports and for the QSFP+ and CXP ports provided by the CFP interface adapters

• Generates and analyzes full line rate 40GbE and 100GbE traffic

• Tracks and analyzes up to 1 million receive flows per port for: