Geeks in Paradise | Brian Chee » Ixia opens their iSim-City for business

April 10, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Ixia opens their iSim-City for business

TAGS: Industry Trends, Lab Freaks, Testing notes

Opened on February 26, 2008, Ixia's iSim-City is a beautifully implemented facility that combines an executive briefing center with a large-scale proof-of-concept lab that can be used alone or with professional services. Located in Santa Clara, this city-scale testing facility is designed to meet corporate overflow testing requirements and will be used for some upcoming InfoWorld shootouts. In my case, I'll be showing up at the start of my test, but after the scripts and methodology are debugged, I'll be able to fly home and run all my tests remotely. With upwards of 5000 gigabit ports on demand, this facility should be able to fulfill whatever testing scenario you can dream up. Trust me, I'm going to see if I can build some shootouts that will stretch this lab's capability ... maybe ...

 

It was over some truly great curry that Ixia CEO Atul Bhatnagar and I started dreaming of just what an InfoWorld + Ixia testing partnership could do. So although we already have some Ixia testing gear in the Advanced Network Computing Laboratory at the University of Hawaii, what we don't have and can't afford is thousands of ports. One test we've always had to shy away from is that huge 10gig campus/colo/ISP shootout we've had on the back burner for the last couple of years.

The reality is that corporate America needs testing. You don't buy a car unless you've taken it for a test drive, and you don't just sit in the driver seat nor do you just see if the trunk lid opens. The point I'm trying to make is that network testing that runs synthetic traffic across a real network gives you that baseline performance metric with which to judge further upgrades. I've heard a multitude of horror stories about a shoot-from-the-hip guestimate going horribly wrong because no one knew how the network was doing as a system instead of a single device. Over the years I've tried very hard to stay neutral when it comes to test equipment but everyone has weak and strong points; Ixia's strength has consistently been the attention to the Human Computer Interface (HCI). It was just easier to run and thusly more approachable. The stigma has been that you had to be a super human network engineer to run these types of tests. Heck, I've heard some rumblings that you had to be super-human just to know enough to ask the right questions.

What I'm looking at doing is to work with test equipment vendors to publish testing scenarios. We've published out methodologies in the past, but I think it's high time that we flesh these out in more detail so our tests can more easily be duplicated by you the readers.

So to that end CEO Bhatnagar and I also dreamed of cooperative education projects and my dream of creating a coalition of advanced networking labs across the country. We're going to test the water by leveraging Ixia's experience and resources with my years of experience teaching kids about real world networking. I'm dreaming of this coalition graduating hundreds of students a year, helping to fill corporate America's need for the next generation of network engineer. Stay tuned; maybe this partnership between InfoWorld and Ixia will yield more than just cool tests. Maybe it will also result in a skilled workforce able to help you confirm vendor claims on performance instead of just trusting those glossies.

Posted by Brian Chee on April 10, 2008 03:30 PM

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