Network Performance Testing

Back in 2005, we had a bake-off for switch vendors at the company where I work to pick a large port count, line rate switch that included 1GB and 10GB ports.  Since that time, we’ve gotten a lot of good mileage out of the switches we chose, which were Foundry RX-series chassis.  We ended up with one RX-16 and one RX-8 switch, all fully loaded with power supplies, switch fabric, and management modules.

We have a small amount of 24 port 1GB copper cards – the majority of the cards are the RX-Bi48T which is a 48 port MRJ-21 connector style card.  It requires a lot of additional cabling and breakout boxes, but it’s worth it to get more out of your switch.

The Foundry architecture for the 1GB 24 port cards only allows 20 of the 24 ports to operate at line rate, but we’ve planned our architecture not to be a problem.  The 48 port cards only allow 40 of the 48 ports.  Again, we’ve planned around this limitation.

In addition to the cards above, we  use the 4 port 10GB card for our larger devices, and as interconnects between the two RX’es, and many smaller switches such as the Force10 S50 and Foundry FESX-448.

We are moving away from Foundry equipment, however, due to a lot of failures over the last year and the need for a more port-dense 10GB switch for our larger products.  The Force10 C300 is a very attractive option – it’s significantly less expensive that the RX, and many of the other switches out there, and performs better in many cases – line rate in the case of the C300.  We have several already in-house and have been very impressed.

In all cases, the moment we get a new switch, we do many L2/L3 tests with various IXIA and Spirent devices to make sure we understand the limitations.  In the last few years, we haven’t found any issues with the new vendors and switches we’ve come across – at least none of the serious line rate issues we found in the past, including with the RX-series chassis.

Looking forward to spending more time with Force10 products in the near future.

IXIA announced today their plans to perform a big test at Interop with Force10 for 10GE switching.  It will require 280 IxYukon 10GE test ports, and end up sending and receiving 5.6 terabits per second of traffic.  Quite a bit of traffic!

Seems that  lot of people are doing the bigger/faster/more test stuff – Spirent did a 10GB test back in October that was, at the time, the largest.  BreakingPoint also did a big test with Juniper back in March, although that test was markedly different in the goals and type of test.

Those of you going to Interop (I’m not) should stop by and let us know what it looks like.