One week ago, IXIA, a network hardware company, purchased Caimis, a network management software company. Just one week later, the combined companies release products that display an impressive hardware-plus-software synergy.

ISP-Planet Staff [November 13, 2001]

IXIA, a manufacturer of traffic testing hardware for fiber optic networks and related technologies, recently purchased Caimis, a software developer whose products analyze and visualize the performance of large networks.

Today, the two companies are announcing several new products that bring together their complementary areas of expertise.

IxTraffic monitors networks while they're up and running, testing stability, availability, jitter, and loss. An IXIA hardware probe sits at the core of the network and generates minute quantities of traffic to measure one-way latency and loss.

Eran Karoly, IXIA vice president of marketing, said that service providers need to measure one-way latency, not round trip latency. "Round trip measurements are not sufficient for testing VoIP and video services," he said. "If it takes 100ms to get from San Francisco to New York and back, you need to know whether it's symmetric, or whether there's a delay in one direction."

IxCore uses Border Gateway Protocol (BGP4) to combine routing analysis, path performance analysis, and peering analysis into one product.

Geo-imaging software from Ixia

Mapping software from Caimis (see diagram at left) enables IxMapper to allow a service provider to obtain a picture showing which Internet routes are cheap and effective, overlaid on a world map.

According to Karoly, the product uses "approximatly twelve" different databases whose veracity is tested every night.

Ixia products use IxEdge to test the availability of a connection between any two servers. The software usually runs automatically, but can also be used to manually check the status of any specified pipe.

IxProfile is a security product intended to help service providers protect their networks. The hardware side detects Denial of Service (DoS) or other attacks by sampling traffic. It can filter traffic (i.e. throttle down the bandwidth available to it) according to traffic patterns or also according to the geographical location of the request. Karoly says the product's filtering technology is granular enough to protect one client's website from probes from a specific nation, city, or IP address.

The product also offers packet-based sampling, and the analysis can be downloaded and stored for further investigation, potentially enabling powerful post-event processing.

The final product released today is IxActivate, a circuit turn-up mechanism in a field-portable chassis. It can be brought to a customer's premises and used to test not only the electrical connection in the circuit, but also the TCP/IP and HTTP layers. With simple connectors, this product can work with SONET networks as well as Ethernet networks operating from 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps.

As of September 30, 2001, Ixia (NASDAQ: XXIA) had $111.9 million in cash and no long-term debt.

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