News
ProCurve’s New Core Switch Passes Tough Tests
October 2007 by Marc Jacob
In a newly-commissioned test, run on sophisticated Ixia test-bed equipment, ProCurve’s new 8212zl Core Switch was run through a series of very demanding performance tests. In all tests, the new switch matched or exceeded ProCurve’s own published specs. The report, launched at industry press and analyst event, NetEvents today, is now available for download.
The commissioned tests were designed with the following in mind and resulted in:
Within the scope of these tests Broadband Testing sought to prove that the ProCurve Switch 8212zl is capable of supporting high levels of data and real-time traffic across a 10-Gigabit Ethernet (or multiples thereof) network core.
The product was placed into a million-dollar testbed provided by Ixia (www.ixiacom.com), which was capable of generating very high levels of general (HTTP, FTP etc) traffic, as well as real-time application delivery such as VoIP and Video-on-Demand.
The test-bed emulated an enterprise topology using the OSPF routing protocol to fully stress the 8212zl. In addition, live Video, Voice over IP and HTTP/FTP applications were also emulated over the advertised OSPF routes by Ixia test ports to measure the end user’s experience on overall service quality.
Taking, as the starting point, ProCurve published figures, it was found that the switch’s performance equalled or beat every single one of them within the tests.
The tests achieved line rate performance with zero packet loss.
The switch was able to deliver high-resolution video and VoIP (300 streams and 240 calls per second respectively) successfully over an already heavily loaded network (in excess of 7Gbps of HTTP/FTP traffic per port).
Additionally, the testing found that the new Core switch has a broad spectrum of traffic and network management functionality, security options and a wireless edge option, so is a very comprehensive product in its own right beyond the basic core backbone requirements.
