LAS VEGAS -- Greenfield Networks, the emerging leader in world-class Ethernet silicon switch technology, announced today that it selected Ixia’s (Nasdaq: XXIA) wide range of testing technologies to speed the development of the GH6000, its high density Gigabit Ethernet reference design chassis. Ixia’s industry-leading routing protocol analysis tools were used to validate the performance and conformance metrics during key design and development milestones for the GH6000.

Greenfield Networks has also selected Ixia’s Optixia, the world’s highest density testing platform, to demonstrate the GH6000 this week during Networld + Interop, Las Vegas, Nevada. The Optixia testing platform will be configured with 128 ports of Gigabit Ethernet to fully test the feature set and performance of the GH6000 chassis, which is powered by Greenfield’s Packetry™ switching family, the industry’s most advanced Ethernet switch silicon solution.

“The GH6000 is the highest density Gigabit edge chassis platform available today, which is why we’re using Ixia’s Optixia with its unprecedented ability to verify the rich feature set of the GH6000’s 128 Gigabit Ethernet ports at N+I,” said Richard Heaton, vice president, software engineering and co-founder of Greenfield Networks. “Throughout the development cycle of the system, we utilized a variety of Ixia equipment, especially its sophisticated routing protocols analysis suites, to test our Packetry family, which supports deep buffering and extensive QoS features, and provides robust performance in a real world environment.”

During the demonstration, the GH6000 platform will be supporting protocol stack software from multiple third party vendors, including Layer 2/3 STP, RIP, OSPF, BGP, and PIM. In addition, the GH6000 supports IPv6 protocols RIPng and OSPFv3 as well as MPLS protocols such as LDP. Because the Optixia supports a wide array of protocols, Greenfield can easily verify performance metrics such as throughput and latency, while emulating complex networking protocols at Gigabit wire-speed.

“Ixia is pleased Greenfield Networks will be using our Optixia platform to demonstrate the GH6000. The Optixia won the Best of Interop Award in 2001 and still is the industry’s highest port density test solution available,” said Alan Amrod, vice president, marketing for Ixia. “Naturally, we’re delighted Greenfield Networks has used Ixia gear throughout the developmental stages of the GH6000, and are confident that its use contributed to their expeditious time-to-market cycle.”

Greenfield Networks has developed the Packetry family with tremendous upfront effort focused on real network performance. Enterprise edge traffic is exclusively uplink-downlink, with many desktop PC’s contending for limited uplink bandwidth to servers. TCP performance is severely impacted by packet loss and therefore requires sufficient buffering at potential congestion points in the network to prevent possible packet loss. It is also important for network equipment manufacturers to provide sophisticated QoS aware handling at every congestion point to guarantee the delivery of high priority traffic. The Packetry family supports the deep buffering and QoS features required to prevent the packet loss that occurs in less robust solutions.

The Greenfield Networks Packetry family currently consists of the G525 Packet Engine, the G750 Shared Memory Fabric, and the G120 Intelligent Multiplexer.

Greenfield Networks

Ixia