About Xena Networks

Building the world’s best Ethernet test solution

Xena Networks is an emerging leader in the Ethernet industry, committed to assisting companies in bringing new Ethernet products faster to market by offering efficient testing solutions covering every phase from R&D and QA labs to when the component leaves the production site.

Our customer base comprises network equipment and semiconductor manufacturers, government and defense contractors, automotive manufacturers, 5G service providers, electronic contract manufacturers, large enterprises, and data center operators.

Our Industry Trends

Ethernet is the de facto technology for internet and data center networking and is now finding broad new areas of applications in cellular networks, cars, and manufacturing. These global megatrends are driving Xena’s vision for Ethernet networking technology testing.

The Internet is evolving

Social networking, e-commerce, and video streaming are already an integral part of everyday life. And now big data, cloud services, artificial intelligence, new media, and augmented reality are further accelerating an unprecedented explosion of data and traffic, driving the continuous adoption of faster Ethernet networking speeds across internet, data center, and 5G cellular networks. As a result, there is high demand for performance testing and simulation of high-capacity Ethernet networks and components.

The transportation industry is evolving

Cars and airplanes are morphing into autonomous mobile data centers featuring sophisticated bandwidth-hungry applications that improve safety, fuel consumption, while delivering a great experience for both drivers and passengers. This places huge demands on manufacturers to ensure the best possible Quality of Service (QoS) and reliability, which is driving demand for rigorous and automated testing of in-transportation Ethernet networks and components.

The manufacturing industry is evolving

Ethernet networking technology is already commonplace in production environments ranging from industrial factories, automotive plants, and electronics and high-tech manufacturing facilities. This new era in manufacturing is commonly referred to as “Industry 4.0”, with focus on interconnectivity, automation, machine learning, and real-time data. Building these futuristic smart manufacturing ecosystems requires networking determinism and reliability, which in turn demands in-depth precision testing of industrial Ethernet networks and components.

Our Product Vision

Xena’s product vision is an Ethernet test platform that is scalable and hardware agnostic, provides best-in-class automation capabilities for open test suite and regression testing developments, offers an intuitive user experience, and supports business models ranging from perpetual to subscription to pay-per-use licensing.

Since launching our first Valkyrie 1-GigE traffic generation and analysis tool in 2010, we have been driven by the explosive demand for high-speed Ethernet, and are today at the Ethernet technology edge with our 800-GigE traffic generation and analysis solutions. We expect the highest Ethernet speeds to break the magical Terabit Ethernet barrier well before 2025, with 1600-GigE playing a key role in our platform as the market is propelled forwards towards Terabit Ethernet.

Xena’s traffic generators make it easy to generate predictable traffic. But real-world networks are unpredictable due to phenomena such as latency, jitter, and packet loss. Our high-speed Chimera network impairment emulation solution helps customers accurately assess the performance of networks under real-life conditions, and we see tight integration of traffic generation and network impairment as a fundamental test capability.

The transportation, manufacturing, data center, and 5G industries require real-time communication with deterministic and reliable Quality of Service (QoS). We believe Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) will play a key role in this, and that TSN will become ubiquitous in automotive and industrial IoT applications. We are experts in Ethernet technology which is in our engineering “DNA”, and we are using this know-how to build advanced TSN Timing, Resiliency, and QoS test technologies into our platform.

Our stateless Valkyrie Ethernet/IP traffic generation and analysis solutions are supplemented by our Vulcan stateful TCP traffic generation and analysis to enable performance benchmarking and QoS validation of firewall and security perimeters. Xena’s large scale optimized stateful TCP test solutions deliver traffic generation and analysis capacity magnitudes beyond what is achievable using conventional load testing tools. We have chosen to pioneer in the field of stateful firewall performance testing with our Safire firewall performance tester, as we believe this is a critical test component for enterprise, data center, and IoT applications.

We are committed to providing a platform that can span from the R&D and Q&A labs to when the component leaves the production site, and Vantage is our solution for Ethernet device production turn-up testing. Today, manufacturers often deploy R&D test solutions for Ethernet assembly line testing, but this approach is not optimal from a cost and operational perspective, and we believe that manufacturing solutions must be designed ground-up for integration into Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) to support the new smart manufacturing era.

The magic of our Ethernet test platforms is in the software architecture and user experience, and with hardware playing a key role for platforms scalability and flexibility. We support two complementary hardware architectures. The first one being minimalistic Xena proprietary HW designs using advanced FPGAs to deliver precision and density, and the second being commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) servers configured with Network Interface Controllers (NIC). A key element in our platform vision is the use of Network Virtualization technologies, to enable our customers to freely choose and mix between Xena hardware, 3rd party hardware, and standard hardware for all of our test tools.

We are building the ultimate Ethernet test platform.

Jacob V. Nielsen
Chief Executive Officer