Axtrinet™ APG Ethernet Packet Generators offer affordable 40Gbps & 10Gbps full wire-speed Ethernet load generation, capture and analysis capabilities for R&D, manufacturing, sales and support teams developing and selling products with high speed Ethernet interfaces.

An intuitive Graphical Control Interface or TCL-scripted interface can be used to configure and control the packet generation, capture and analysis capabilities of the unit via a Linux or Windows PC, managing it locally over USB or remotely over Ethernet LAN.

This application note describes how the Axtrinet™ APG Ethernet Packet Generators can be used by the Sales Teams to demonstrate Ethernet-enabled products to new customers, and Support Teams to diagnose customer issues.

Benefits

Axtrinet™ APG Ethernet Packet Generators have been developed by a team with decades of experience in the networking industry to deliver the functions and capability required by Sales and Support engineers demonstrating and debugging products with 10Gbps or 40Gbps Ethernet interfaces:

• Compact and portable
• Lowest cost-per-gigabit Ethernet packet generator
• Wire speed testing at 40Gbps and 10Gbps
• 8 independent streams per port and bit-level control of the Layer 2-4 frame data to create specific traffic patterns
• Create real life traffic patterns to demonstrate equipment; test patterns and capture packets to debug live issues in the field
• Packet and rate counters (packets, bytes, bits and errors)
• 1Gbit capture buffer for packet analysis
• Easy offload to third party analysis tools such as Wireshark™ using industry standard PCAP files
• Easy to use graphical Control Interface
• Open TCL based API for scripting and test automation
• Simple to manage using USB or Ethernet

• Compact size – 1U, 1/3 rack width, 1.2kg

Sales

The traditionally high cost of 10Gbps and 40Gbps Ethernet test solutions meant that availability of suitable equipment to demonstrate high speed interfaces at the customer’s site was restricted. Alternative solutions were found that were unable to demonstrate the product to its maximum potential, with compromised performance, flexibility or port density.

Axtrinet™ APG Ethernet Packet Generators are designed to solve this problem, offering the ‘lowest cost per gigabit’ wire rate 10Gbps and 40Gbps test solutions in a compact, portable and quiet enclosure.

An Axtrinet unit stores its configuration on-board and will start up with the same configuration it had when it was powered down. Configurations can be loaded into a unit before the sales meeting to maximise the demonstration benefits.

The intuitive graphical Control Interface provides quick port and stream configuration capabilities; with large control buttons; and clear port transmit and receive packet, byte and bit counter and statistic displays.

Support Engineers

FAEs and Support Engineers are often the poor relations of the R&D team, and availability of high speed Ethernet data sources may be restricted.

Resourceful engineers found alternative solutions to enable field issues to be diagnosed at a customer’s site; or in the laboratory that compromised performance, flexibility or port density.

Each 10Gbps and 40Gbps interface supports optical and Direct Attach transceivers. The 10Gbps SFP+ interface additionally supports 1000Base-T transceivers.

The 40Gbps QSFP+ interface can operate in 40Gbps or 4x10Gbps modes so a single APG208 can generate Ethernet test packets on 16x 10Gbps ports.

The intuitive graphical Control Interface provides quick port and stream configuration capabilities; with large control buttons; and clear port transmit and receive packet, byte and bit counter and statistic displays.

The TCL API scripting interface for the Axtrinet™ APG Ethernet Packet Generators can be used to configure the unit, ports and streams; control the traffic generation; and read the port counters long-term testing.

The port counters and statistics can be logged and processed at regular intervals to verify correct behaviour over the duration of the test.