SCIENCE

Spirent Communications has joined the Ethernet Alliance in a live multi-vendor interoperability event that demonstrates the performance of next generation data center technologies during SC10 in New Orleans, November 15 - 18. Spirent’s involvement in this event underscores the company’s commitment to advancing Ethernet technologies within the high power computing (HPC) industry, through comprehensive testing.

As data centers get larger, faster and more complex, new technologies such as virtualization, FCoE and 40/100G Ethernet aim to help organizations move terabits of diverse traffic types onto a single, converged network. Validation and performance assessment are vital first steps in implementing these new technologies. In a data center context, that means testing each technology, not just by itself but also in concert with many other data center components, old and new.

“To expand a data center’s ability to support next-generation technologies and subscriber services, it’s critical to understand how it performs in a multi-technology environment and to know if network components work together as a coherent whole,” said Jeff Schmitz, vice president, Networks & Applications group at Spirent. “Spirent has long advocated an end-to-end testing approach to help organizations develop confidence in new technologies, and allow data centers to grow larger and more cost-effective over time.”

The demonstration, which highlights technologies such as FCoE, 10GBASE-T, iSCSI, iWARP and RDMA over Converged Ethernet, uses several modules from Spirent’s award-winning layer 1-7 integrated performance test system, Spirent TestCenter. The Spirent HyperMetrics 40/100 GigE module showcases the performance of the industry’s best-in-class high-speed Ethernet data center solutions. The Spirent HyperMetrics CV module stresses the multi-vendor network at 10GigE speeds. In addition, the seamless interworking of Ethernet to Fibre Channel is proven using the Spirent HyperMetrics FC module.

Also at SC10, Spirent’s senior product marketing manager, Jurrie van den Breekel is moderating and speaking in a session titled “Enabling High Performance Cloud Computing Environment”. The session, at 12:15 pm on Thursday, November 18 in room #399, will explore and explain how key network attributes of performance, availability, security and scalability impact the quality of cloud computing environments.