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HP calls it ProCurve 9304M,; Foundry calls it BigIron 4000. Just don't call it slow - this Gigabit Ethernet switch doesn't miss a bit.
What has two names, four slots, switches or routes at 32G bit/sec, and leaves most of the other Gigabit Ethernet switches we've tested in the dust?
Hewlett-Packard calls it the ProCurve Routing Switch 9304M, and that's the version we evaluated. But Foundry Networks, which actually makes the HP hardware, calls it the BigIron 4000. Either way, with each of its four chassis slots filled with eight-port gigabit modules, the switch delivered maximum traffic loads on each port and didn't miss a beat (or a bit).
We first tested Layer 2 media access control (MAC) switching with static streams. That's where all of port l's traffic is switched to port 32, all of port 2's input is switched to port 31, and so on. Then we tested Layer 2 switching using the "mesh test" feature of bda Communications' V(LA 1600 traffic generator/ analyzer, This is a grueling workout, in which packets arriving at a gigabit per second on each port (that's 1.488 million minimum-sized packets per second) are sequentially switched to each of the other ports in roundrobin fashion. Picture a big round table, at which each of 32 dealers is dealing cards to the others at a rate of 1.488 million cards per second.
Under all Layer 2 configurations we found 100% wire-speed performance.
Next we tried Layer 3 IP routing, after setting up IP subnets on each of the 32 ports. We got the same results: 100% wire-speed performance, even for round-robin, mesh test routing among all ports.
In virtually every other performance metric, the switch checks out just fine. Head-of-line blocking? There wasn't any. Latency? It ranged from a mere 7 microseconds for 64byte packets under a light switch load to 70 microseconds with a full load on all ports. jitter? The worst we saw was 17 microseconds...