Testing Reports

Force10 S4810 High-Performance 10/40 GbE Top-of-Rack Switch

Lippis Report: Open Industry Network Performance & Power Test

To test products, each supplier brought its engineers to configure its equipment for test. An Ixia test engineer was available to assist each supplier through test methodologies and review test data. After testing was concluded, each supplier’s engineer signed off on the resulting test data. We call the following set of testing conducted “The Lippis Test.” The test methodologies included:

Throughput Performance: Throughput, packet loss and delay for layer-2 (L2) unicast, layer-3 (L3) unicast and layer-3 multicast traffic was measured for packet sizes of 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 1280, 1518, 2176, 9216 bytes. Ixia’s IxNetwork RFC 2544 Throughput/Latency quick test was used to perform all but the multicast tests. Ixia’s IxAutomate RFC 3918 Throughput No Drop Rate test was used for the multicast test.

Latency: Latency was measured for all the above packet sizes plus the special mix of north-south and east-west traffic blend. Two latency tests were conducted: 1) latency was measured as packets flow between two ports on different modules for modular switches, and 2) between far away ports (port pairing) for ToR switches to demonstrate latency consistency across the forwarding engine chip. Latency test port configuration was via port pairing across the entire device versus side-by-side. This meant that a switch with N ports, port 1 was paired with port (N/2)+1, port 2 with port (N/2)+2, etc. Ixia’s IxNetwork RFC 2544 Throughput / Latency quick test was used for validation. Jitter: Jitter statistics was measured during the above throughput and latency test using Ixia’s IxNetwork RFC 2544 Throughput/Latency quick test.

Congestion Control Test: Ixia’s IxNetwork RFC 2889 Congestion test was used to test both L2 and L3 packets. The objective of the Congestion Control Test is to determine how a Device Under Test (DUT) handles congestion. Does the device implement congestion control and does congestion on one port affect an uncongested port? This procedure determines if Head-of-Line (HOL) blocking and/ or if back pressure are present. If there is frame loss at the uncongested port, HOL blocking is present. Therefore, the DUT cannot forward the amount of traffic to the congested port, and as a result, it is also losing frames destined to the uncongested port. If there is no frame loss on the congested port and the port receives more packets than the maximum offered load of 100%, then Back Pressure is present.

Force10 ExaScale E-Series E1200i Core Switch/Router

Energy Consumption Evaluation

Second, perhaps, only to performance, energy efficiency has rapidly become a critical consideration when deciding upon data center network infrastructure. Higher energy consumption is a recurring cost that can add dramatically to operation expense over time. Furthermore, devices that consume more power require more cooling which not only further increases energy costs but impacts the physical design of the data center.

10 Gigabit Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet Performance Evaluation

Data center, high-performance enterprise and service provider network operators are faced with supporting network infrastructures in which core network or aggregation devices must act as workhorses and cannot become a bottleneck to network performance. It is imperative that such devices exhibit low latency and line-rate throughput -- or as close to is as possible. Moreover, such switches or routers must be able to maintain performance even as the number of clients it supports scales significantly. And, there presence of active services, such as access control lists (ACLs) and other advanced features cannot have a unfavorable effect on the device performance.

Evaluation of Resiliency, Advanced QoS, and Scalability

Service providers and high-end enterprise network architects must build networks that not only deliver high-throughput but that can prioritize traffic effectively, offer hitless recovery from failures of key components, resist massive Denial of Service attacks, and converge large numbers of BGP and OSPF routes rapidly.

C-Series Test Results

Broadband Testing and Ixia Tested: 384 Ports Line-rate GE Converged Services

Using the testbed over several weeks of testing, we found that the Force10 Networks C300 chassis-based Ethernet switch is totally capable of running line-rate performance when fully loaded (1.536 Tbps throughput), port-configuration wise, while retaining high-availability. We created a series of tests that both proved the C300 capable of sustaining line-rate performance across all 384 ports and its ability to support a wide range of application types, notably real-time applications, through delivering very low latency figures. This is a perfect combination for almost any user scenario.

Test date: February 2008

S–Series Test Results

Tolly Tested: S2410

The Tolly Group certified that the Force10 S2410 data center switch delivers ultra-low switching latency and high 10 Gigabit Ethernet performance. During testing, the Force10 S2410 demonstrated 100 percent line-rate throughput across all 24 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports at all packet sizes with latency of 300 nanoseconds - the lowest switching latency recorded to date by the independent testing group.

Test date: March 2006