Content area
Full Text
Foundry Networks is king of the price/performance hill among Gigabit Ethernet switch makers.
Foundry's TurboIron/8 switch swept all three Gigabit Ethernet price/performance testing categories - Layer 2, Layer 3 IP and Layer 3 IPX - in Round Two of the ongoing series of SwitchMetric tests co-sponsored by Network World and The Tolly Group.
In sweeping all three Gigabit Ethernet categories, Foundry's TurboIron/8 edged out 3Com's SuperStack II Switch 9300, which last April emerged as the lowest cost-per-gigabit-of-throughput leader in Layer 2 testing.The TurboIron/8 lowered the Layer 2 cost per gigabit of throughput bar, coming in at $1,249, compared to the standing measurement of $1,325 for 3Com's SuperStack II Switch 9300.
But while Foundry managed to pull away from 3Com in the Gigabit Ethernet realm, Hewlett-Packard held on to its significant lead in the Fast Ethernet Layer 2 contest. No switch tested in either round of the SwitchMetric has come close to the $956-pergigabit-of-throughput ranking of HP's ProCurve Switch 4000M.
The Network World/Tolly Group SwitchMetric is a new benchmark intended to help you determine the price you pay for each gigabit per second of throughput a switch provides.
For each type of switch, we gave vendors the option of participating in any or all of three basic tests - Layer 2, Layer 3 IP and Layer 3 IPX depending on which markets they believe their products are best-suited to serve.
For each protocol, we conducted separate tests with frame sizes of 64 bytes, 512 bytes and 1,518 bytes.The cost-per-gigabit-of-throughput results offered are derived from tests with 1,518-byte frames, which offer the least processing overhead of all frame sizes tested and thus should result in the highest throughput.
All tests were conducted in a state-of-the-art test bed featuring Netcom Systems' SmartBits Advanced Multiport Performance Tester/Analyzer/Simulators.
In this second round of testing, we put five switches from four vendors through the...