In this edition we announce the availability of the N2X Packets and Protocols Software Release 6.5, which supports several new products and feature enhancements. If you would like additional information or a personal demonstration of any of the products and features discussed in this bulletin, please contact your local Agilent Sales Representative. Sincerely, N2X Team Agilent Technologies |
| September 2005 |
Release 6.5 Now Available!
Index:
- Triple Play IPTV Service QoE Testing with Agilent N2X
- Industry Leading High Availability Test Capabilities
- Protocol Enhancements - More Realistic and Faster Testing
- Platform Multi-User Enhancements
- Application Usability and GUI enhancements
- New QuickTests
- How to get the latest release?
Additional Resources for Data Networking Test Professionals :
Triple Play IPTV QoE Testing with Agilent N2X
The end user experience of service quality is critical to the success of a service providers IPTV deployment program. A key element of IPTV quality of experience (QoE) is how quickly and reliably end users can change TV channels, often referred to as channel zapping. Using N2X, Network equipment manufacturers can thoroughly characterize channel zapping performance times of their B-RAS and IP-DSLAMs under the complexity and volatility of real world network conditions. Service providers can also validate channel zapping time across their networks end-to-end to have confidence that their service will meet the expected service levels.
Agilent N2X N5570A IPTV Channel Zapping productivity application accurately profiles performance by:
- Emulating real-world network conditions including simultaneous PPPoX, DHCP, and IGMP sessions and traffic
- Scaling to hundreds of TV channels and thousands of subscribers
- Simulating realistic channel zapping scenarios including thousands of IPTV viewers "Channel Zapping” at the same time
- Providing hardware time stamping to ensure measurement repeatability and reliability
- Per subscriber measurement granularity not just the average or aggregate
>>> IPTV Testing | Technical Datasheet | Return to Top
Industry Leading High Availability Test Capabilities
N2X provides the industry's most complete High Availabilty solution with scalable emulation software, a dedicated productivity application automating complex scenarios and a Graceful Restart Conformance Test suite. Equipment manufactuers and services providers can save many months of test engineering effort through the rich set of N2X automation tools.
Agilent N2X ensures test realism, scalability and faster time to insight.
- Verify device control plane restart performance and scalability with concurrent, multi-protocol graceful restart emulation on a single port
- Characterize the impact of network impairments on Layer 2/3 services and end user experience
- Simplify and accelerate testing of network reliability with a focused productivity application and conformance test suite
New Features:
- Graceful Restart for
- Most comprehensive Fast Reroute for RSVP on the market
- Per layer stimulus timestamping with highly accurate failover time measurements on laser off and SONET alarms
- Industry only Graceful Restart Conformance test Suite to verify protocol GR extensions
- MD5 authentication for BGP and LDP
- Industry only High Availability custom application to simplify complex, highly scaled, multi-protocol GR tests using common canned tests.
>>> Testing High Availability Webinar | High Availability Solutions | Return to
Top
Protocol Enhancements- More Realistic and Faster Testing
N2X Packets and Protocols Release 6.5 includes a range of protocol enhancements including:
E7882A IPv4 Routing Emulation Software
- IS-IS IPv4 & OSPFv2 Graceful Restart
- MD5 Authentication for BGP & LDP
- BGP VPNv6
- Multicast VPN BGP extensions
E7883A MPLS Signaling Emulation Software
- RSVP & LDP Graceful Restart
- RSVP Fast Re-route & Make-Before-Break
- Auto/manual transmission of custom XML-defined RSVP messages/objects
- LDP DU LSP Discard Mode
- OSPF GMPLS PSC Advertisement
E7886A Multicast Routing Emulation Software
- Multicast VPN PIM extensions
- IGMP query message transmission for SUT IGMP snoops
E7888A Access Protocol Emulation Software
- PPPoX enhancements including user specified ranges for PPP authentication paramaters
- ACCM option to simulate older DSL clients
- PPPoE vendor-specific tags supporting "PPPoE Intermediate Agent" function for testing IP DSLAMs
- Custom user authentication values supporting IP anti-spoofing scenarios
Platform Multi-User Enhancements
N2X Packets and Protcols Release 6.5 supports user-per-port on 10/100, Tri-rate Ethernet XP-2 and XR-2 test cards and multi-user support across N2X chassis. Multiple users can now independently use each port on the new next generation Ethernet cards (N5550A/1A/2A/3A). The new “Virtual Mega-Chassis” lets up to 16 users share any card across the entire system of interconnected chassis.
Application Usability and GUI enhancements
Release 6.5 introduces the following Application Usability and GUI enhancements:
Performance dashboard
A new dashboard feature assists in protocol scalability testing by providing insight into memory and CPU resource usage on N2X test cards. You can monitor test card usage and scale tests without overwhelming the system resources.
Statistics save/restore
Accelerate the time from session restore to test by eliminating the need to manually select statistics.
Error Reporting
Error highlighter feature highlights “streams of interest” enabling you to find errors faster.
Physical layer stimulus time-stamping
On optical interfaces, events such as SONET alarms or laser activation/deactivation are accurately time-stamped and correlated to traffic and routing events. This provides the industry’s most accurate and repeatable resiliency measurements such as MPLS fast reroute time.
Crash recovery
If a test session crashes, the current test configuration and a trace log of API calls are automatically saved, allowing you to send the files to Agilent for troubleshooting, or self-diagnose problems and resume testing. In some cases, only the GUI crashes and the test session remains running in the background. N2X now prompts you to connect a new GUI to the session that is still running.
>>> Return to Top
Agilent's QuickTest Script Library is a comprehensive set of tools and scripts that simplify and automate the testing of data networking devices and networks using the Agilent N2X.
The QuickTest library includes a wide range of predefined scripts that automate functional and performance testing across the full spectrum of router and network behavior.
N2X Packets and Protocols Release 6.5 includes the following new QuickTests:
- PIM Multicast Forwarding Performance [Additional 9 tests]
- RFC2544 Ethernet Performance [Additional 1 test] (3 tests are superseded)
- Routing Stability [Additional 2 tests]
Lightreading High Availability Webinar
Network availability is an essential part of a service provider’s ability to deliver revenue-generating services. Even small periods of network downtime can result in lost revenue, diminished customer satisfaction and damaged company reputation. Traditional IP routing solutions delivering recovery times in the order of minutes are no longer acceptable. High Availability (HA) protection and recovery mechanisms are emerging to meet the ever-increasing network availability demanded by customers and like any other network function requires thorough testing. This Webinar will closely examine HA mechanisms and present a set of test methodologies to validate their correct operation. Carrier network operators and routing equipment manufacturers can use these test methodologies to quantify the robustness of HA implementations and protect against lost service revenues.
>>> Testing High Availability Webinar | High Availability Solutions | Return to Top
Lightreading TriplePlay IPTV QoE Webinar
This webinar will help equipment developers and network operators maximize the perceived quality of video services by understanding and solving the key challenges that impact performance. Learn how to measure the many factors that influence IPTV Quality of Experience (QoE) in Triple Play networks including:
- Quantify the quality of streamed video and audio content, and how the subscriber’s perception is impacted by bandwidth and QoS control, RTSP server performance, network latency and jitter, packet mis-sequencing, and data application traffic;
- Observe the automated testing of channel zapping time, examine the relationship to IP multicast performance, and study the importance of a realistic testbed that can emulate thousands of subscribers;
- Understand the challenges of security and reliability, and see how DoS attacks, network outages, and poorly implemented security equipment can compromise subscriber capacity.
This session will show you techniques for evaluating the performance of IP TV and Triple Play devices such as DSLAMs, B-RASs, service / edge routers, application-aware firewalls and gateways, and streaming video servers.
>>> Measureably Improve IPTV QoE Webinar | IPTV Solutions | Return to Top
How to get the latest release?
This release is available to all N2X customers who have a current and activated Software and Support Agreement (SSA). You can download the release from the N2X Technical Support web area. If you have activated your SSA, you will automatically receive 6.5 upgrade kits containing the software on a CD, and are also entitled to in-depth technical phone support. To purchase or renew your SSA, please contact your local Agilent representative.
>>> What's in Release 6.5? | Download Software | Customer Web| About SSA | Activate SSA | Return to Top
This information is distributed in order to keep you
up to date with the latest developments to the Agilent N2X system and
related data-networking test resources.
The team at Agilent thanks you for your ongoing support.