Keysight Technologies has introduced the Keysight Elastic Network Generator (KENG) software, marking a significant advancement in network testing. The network test platform presented is an agile and composable system that has been built with an open vendor-neutral application programming interface (API). Its main objective is to enable continuous integration (CI) processes.
In today’s dynamic networking environment, businesses must find new ways to ensure seamless connectivity, interoperability, and innovation. While traditional networking environments often rely on proprietary testing solutions, these closed test systems create challenges for engineers and network architects since they operate in isolation, lack interoperability, and flexibility. This lack of compatibility makes it difficult for devices and technologies from different companies to communicate seamlessly, which slows innovation and limits adaptability to the growing demands of highly distributed modern applications.
In response to these challenges, Keysight founded the vendor-neutral Open Traffic Generator (OTG) API project to transform network infrastructure testing and address the demand for an automation-friendly, open and intent-based testing approach. The OTG project enables cross-industry co-design of test suites in open networking projects such as OpenConfig, SAI, SONiC, SONiC-DASH, and DENT.
The KENG software supports the OTG API, integrates with several network emulation platforms, and drives a range of Keysight network infrastructure test software and hardware products. This includes containerized Ixia-c software and the new white box composable UHD400T line-rate 400GE traffic generator.
Introducing a revolutionary 'Compliance as a Code' workflow, Keysight Technologies simplifies compliance testing, ensuring seamless qualification and interoperability of vendor equipment. This innovation offers unparalleled adaptability, capable of running in any containerized environment, facilitating consistent testing across various settings, including developer laptops, software pipelines in public/private clouds, certification labs, as well as data center and edge locations for collaborative multi-vendor testing. By incorporating field test cases into the development cycle, it enhances quality, mitigating costly design and test redundancies. The platform enables writing a test once and running it anywhere, significantly reducing time-to-test and providing a more agile user experience for developers and testers. Moreover, it accelerates network validation, minimizing the reliance on real network hardware for replicating physical network topologies in a lab setting.
Keysight's community version of its Elastic Network generating can simulate border gateway protocol (BGP) sessions and software traffic generating capabilities with complicated patterns to make OTG API adoption in NetDevOps processes easier. The community version is a fantastic way to bring network test to business and service provider CI / CD workflows for robust control and data plane validation.
Roman Dodin, Product Line Manager, Nokia, said: “Keysight Elastic Network Generator software brings new network validation capabilities previously available only in large hardware labs into the thriving Containerlab ecosystem. Containerlab users can now enable their software testbeds with Open Traffic Generator APIs to perform comprehensive functional testing of control plane protocols and customize traffic patterns like never before. Our collaboration with Keysight makes network testing more accessible through Containerlab and unlocks the full potential of CI/CD for network automation.”
Leonid Khedyk, Chief Technology Officer, PLVision, said: “PLvision is collaborating with Keysight in various open networking projects and used Open Traffic Generator to automate tests for such projects. It is great to see that users can start building software testbeds with OTG implementations like Ixia-c and carry the same test scripts to hardware traffic generators with Keysight Elastic Network Generator.”
Ram Periakaruppan, Vice President and General Manager, Network Test & Security Solutions, Keysight, said: “Keysight Elastic Network Generator software represents a significant departure from the legacy black-box approach. Our new solution seamlessly provides test coverage across the entire life cycle of network functions or services. Its open, disaggregated and API-first design has been field tested and proven to be ideal for modern DevOps.”
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