Vendors back Tolly Group/ NW switch test effort

It's a tough job buying a switch these days. When you're talking about devices with 50G bit/sec of capacity and dozens of Fast Ethernet and gigabit ports - far more power than most buyers need today - it's easy to get overwhelmed and assume that any choice will be a safe one for the future of your enterprise network.

But the numbers can be deceiving, and a simple price-per-port comparison can mask real differences in products. As Kevin Tolly, president of The Tolly Group consultancy, wrote in a recent Network World column, "When the products being compared are not delivering the same level of system bandwidth, price per port becomes worse than irrelevant. It becomes misleading."

That's why Network World and The Tolly Group have developed a new switch testing program designed to help customers make better decisions. The Tolly Group Switch Metric will highlight raw switch performance along with a cost-per-gigabit/throughput metric to give buyers an in-depth look at the Layer 2 and Layer 3 switching markets and beyond. We'll take a switch's best throughput and divide it by the retail cost of the system to get a relative cost for each gigabit of throughput, analogous to the cost-per-MIPS metric used in benchmarking computer systems.

Switch Metric tests will be conducted on an ongoing basis, and the results will be presented to our readers twice annually in special features offering insights and advice. Our first article is scheduled to appear in May. We'll also be working with a major trade show to establish a special session highlighting our findings.

We've invited the leading switch makers to participate in our new test program, and the early response is heartening. Alteon Networks, Anritsu, Extreme Networks, FORE Systems, Foundry Networks, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Lucent, Madge, Neo Networks, Nortel/Bay Networks, Performance Technologies, Olicom and Xylan have already committed to the testing, and we expect other vendors to quickly sign on.

If your vendor isn't on our list, ask your representative why.