Industry’s Largest 10 Gigabit Ethernet Test
A pretty interesting press release from Spirent on the Industry’s Largest 10 Gigabit Ethernet Test.
Looks like they tested the new Cisco Nexus 7000 Data Center Switch with the Spirent Test Center chassis.
They tested 256 10GB ports and tested high availability, throughput, latency, and a bunch of other things.
Sounds like quite a switch. In particular I am interested in what 10GB cards were used on the switch, as well as all of the details on the Spirent Test Center chassis – was it one STC chassis, or multiple? What 10GB cards are used in the STC chassis? How long did the tests take to run?
I am hoping there will be a full report released with all details – since Network World was involved, it could be likely.
The Industry’s Largest 10 Gigabit Ethernet Test was preformed on 256 10GigE Ports on a Cisco Nexus 7000 Data Center Switch and the Spirent TestCenter Platform including the SPT-9000A Chassis and the MSA-2001B Duel Port 10 GigE Test Module. Each SPT-9000A Chassis and host 24 Ports of 10 Gigabit Ethernet. The reason why Spirent was used was because of the ever increasing complexity of the DUT. The days of the simple store and forward switch with low reliability are no long with us. Today, customers expect high quality, and highly reliable devices. Arguably, Spirent TestCenter provides the best generation and analysis of traffic per port. Specifily, with 32,000 TX Streams with a reliable IFG and the ability to terminate and analyze 64,000 streams per port, Spirent TestCenter more deeply tests the DUT in a single pass.
Each “Pathway” that is tracked can be setup to traverse the many queues (802.1p, DiffServ, ACL Queues, etc.) simultaneously, filling tables to capacity and pass traffic over those pathways with unique attributes (32,000 unique rates per port, Specific, payloads). Modern testing is a study of analysis. How does the user may meaning out of billions of measurements. Spirent TestCenter was built to Analyze. Since there is no performance or granularity cost of scaling the number of user pathways across the box, the test engineer can examine 45 metrics per pathways, perform true Jitter Analysis, as opposed to inter arrival time, and make correlation of the data.
This is very important for a modern switch such as the Cisco Nexus 7000 because with Spirent, the vendor can test more pathways (Queue traversals), at a fuller capacity (Line rate, table capacity) with better Analysis (45 parallel metrics, Built in real-time Regular expression parsing by content or performance) in fewer passes (one pass). This saves the user time, is more technically accurate, and allows the vendor to debug, tune, and release sooner.
The full article can be viewed at http://www.networkworld.com/reviews/2008/090108-test-cisco-switch-how.html