By Shah Mir Ali Baig

As bandwidth needs continue to grow at a rapid speed, service providers are deploying infrastructure to meet this demand. So what kind of test equipment requirements comes from the customer?

Ethernet speeds are increasing and networks are becoming more intelligent. New demands are forcing service providers and enterprises to evolve their networks quickly—creating highly complex, multi-layer architectures.

Bandwidth-intensive applications are forcing service providers to expand 100G deployments beyond the core into the edge and access networks. But at these speeds, maintaining data integrity becomes challenging. An exciting shift is happening in carrier networking with Virtualization and Software-Defined Networking technologies.

Customers are looking at high-speed Ethernet test solutions to ensure that their 100G and 400G networks perform to expectations and networks are tuned for on-demand delivery with dynamic, agile, and orchestrated services.

Delivering test requirements of 400GE, what productivity / results Spirent test module delivers?

400G network devices will help address the expanding demands for network link speeds expected to exceed 1 Tb/s. Testing is the fundamental building block to delivering reliable, high-performing systems and starts with validating the link’s ability to pass up to line rate traffic as well as testing the functionality, performance, scalability and QoE of the upper-layer engines that deliver services.

Spirent’s 400GbE platform is designed to address today’s IEEE and MSA standards as they evolve. Spirent is committed to addressing these standards’ requirements to help protect customer’s present and future investments.

It seems like, there is an industry-wide maturity of 400GE technologies, and so in terms of commercialization of 400GE, which segments would drive the demand?

The IEEE predicts that mobile devices, high-speed data center servers, internet-enabled entertainment, cloud computing and social media will push network link speeds to 10 Tb/s by 2020. While the development of 400G network devices will help address the expanding demands for network capacity, they present new testing challenges and push the limits of today’s technologies.

The network today is facing critical bandwidth challenges due to surge in HD video and Cloud requirements. How does Spirent satisfy test requirements of the new generation of 400GE?

Spirent’s 400GbE test platform is a complete solution used to perform validation and performance in the design and development of 400G Ethernet, and it is designed to address today’s IEEE and MSA standards as they evolve. Spirent is committed to addressing these standards’ requirements to help protect your present and future investments. Back in June of 2015, Spirent won Best of Interop Tokyo for our 400G Ethernet Test System. At the time, Spirent partnered with Huawei for the first public interoperability demonstration of 400Gb Ethernet. Having products ready early in the development cycle, helps our customers prepare for the expanding demands for bandwidth that high speed Ethernet addresses.

Today, Spirent still offers the most cost-effective solution on a per port basis with the highest port density in the industry for any rack-mounted chassis. Our latest release is a 2-Port Quad Speed 400/200/100/50GbE available with either Native QSFP-DD or Native CFP8. Also available is our quint-speed 100/50/40/25/10G Ethernet performance test modules. All of these modules are designed for service providers and hyperscale deploying multi-rate infrastructure solutions for cloud data center fabrics without breaking the testing budget.

Our technology is a proven one, as the example of this recent public test confirms. Our solution was chosen by China Telecom & Huawei to verify their 400GbE. Tests included the verification of 400GbE port functions such as line-speed forwarding, multi-service stacking, and fault reporting for medium and long-range technologies using Spirent TestCenter.

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