Taking the latest technologies for a test spin isn’t my only reward as a reviewer. Learning how to use slick testing tools is a thrill all its own.Sometimes those two overlap — which was the case recently when I put Cisco’s new Nexus 5000 to the test using technology from Ixia, a vendor that specializes in IP testing.You may be wondering what storage has to do with IP testing. Well, let me set the stage. Cisco’s Nexus 5000 is a revolutionary switch that implements Fibre Channel over Ethernet. FCoE, as I’ve discussed before, shepherds Ethernet to never drop a frame and to speak FC. In doing so, it provides customers an easy-to-deploy consolidation path that allows them to preserve their FC investments. Moreover, it gives vendors the opportunity to sell CNAs (converged network adapters).If you are not familiar with CNAs, think of a host adapter card that mounts a FC ASIC, GbE/10GbE ASIC, and a FCoE ASIC and you’re close to the truth. Mount a CNA or two to your server, link them to GbE ports on the Nexus 5000, and your application can jump to a connected fabric and access all the SAN volumes you give it permission to. This may sound complicated, but it isn’t, as I found in my test.You’ll have to wait for the published results of my evaluation, but my first impression is that the Nexus 5000, along with the Emulex and Qlogic CNAs I used in my test bed, delivers handsomely on the promise of FCoE. What I can say is that the Nexus 5000 is a well-rounded Ethernet switch that can host a number of FC connections side by side with numerous 10G connections. And that’s were Ixia’s tools — in particular, its IP Performance Tester — came into play. These tools proved invaluable in testing the switch under strain.For example, as part of my test, I measured how fast the Nexus 5000 could learn thousands of MAC addresses. The only way to run that test would have been to suddenly connect the switch to thousands of Ethernet devices. But because putting that many machines in one test location is nearly impossible, I had to find an alternative. Ixia did the trick.A few clicks in Ixia’s easy-to-use GUI and I had set up a script to simulate connections with 16,000 MAC addresses. Better yet, I was able to test the switch’s responsiveness by pushing addresses at it at different intervals to see how well it kept up. Thanks to the IP Performance Test, you’ll have the results of that evaluation soon. IP Performance Tester offers many other worthwhile testing features, but I would like to mention one in particular. Imagine the equivalent of an Excel spreadsheet that Ixia’s tool refreshes dynamically to give you insight into, say, the traffic levels your switches’ ports are experiencing. Add to that the ability to create your own formulas, using the content of the cells provided by IxExplorer, and if that doesn’t excite you, not much else will.Do you have a large IP network? What tools are you using for testing and troubleshooting? Leave a comment below or e-mail me.Technorati Tags: Ixia,Cisco,Brocade,QLogic,CNA,converged network adapter,FCoE,fibre channel over Ethernet,Ethernet,fibre channel,IP,fabric,Nexus 5000,Excel