Ixia (Nasdaq: XXIA), a leading provider of application performance and security resilience solutions, announced an update to its ControlTower distributed network visibility platform that includes support for OpenFlow enabled switches from industry leading manufacturers. ControlTower OpenFlow support has at present been interoperability tested with Arista, Dell and HP OpenFlow enabled switches.

“Dell is a leading advocate for standards such as Openflow on our switching platforms to enable rich and innovative networking applications,” said Arpit Joshipura, Vice President, Dell Networking. “With Ixia choosing to support our Dell Networking switches within its ControlTower management framework, Dell can extend cost-effective visibility and our world-class services to our enterprise customers.”

Ixia’s enhanced ControlTower platform takes a unique open-standards based approach to significantly increase scale and flexibility for network visibility deployments. The new integration makes ControlTower the most extensible visibility solution on the market. This allows customers to leverage SDN and seamlessly layer the sophisticated management and advanced processing features of Ixia’s Net Tool Optimizer® (NTO) family of solutions on top of the flexibility and baseline feature set provided by OpenFlow switches.

"Data centers benefit from the power and flexibility that OpenFlow switches can provide but cannot afford to lose network visibility,” said Shamus McGillicuddy, Senior Analyst, Network Management at Enterprise Management Associates. “However organizations can use these same SDN-enabled switches with a visibility architecture to ensure that their existing monitoring and performance management tools can maintain visibility.”

Key highlights of the expanded visibility architecture include:

• Ease of use, advanced processing functions and single pane of glass configuration through Ixia’s NTO user interface and purpose-built hardware
• Full programmability and automation control using RESTful APIs
• Patented automatic filter compiler engine for hassle-free visibility
• Architectural support for line speeds from 1Gbps to 100Gbps in a highly scalable design
• Open, standards-based integration with the flexibility to use a variety of OpenFlow enabled hardware and virtual switch platforms
• Dynamic repartitioning of switch ports between production switching and visibility enablement to optimize infrastructure utilization

“This next-generation ControlTower delivers solutions that leverage open standards to pair Ixia’s field-proven visibility architecture with best of breed switching, monitoring and security platforms,” added Deepesh Arora, Vice President of Product Management at Ixia. These solutions will provide our customers the flexibility needed to access, aggregate and manage their business-critical networks for the highest levels of application performance and security resilience.”

About Ixia’s Visibility Architecture

Ixia’s Visibility Architecture helps companies achieve end-to-end visibility and security in their physical and virtual networks by providing their tools with access to any point in the network. Regardless of network scale or management needs, Ixia’s Visibility Architecture delivers the control and simplicity necessary to improve the usefulness of these tools.

Thanks to Ixia for the article.