3Com recently commissioned the Tolly Group to run some tests on one of its switches. The Tolly Group tested 3Com’s Switch 5500G-EI for frame/packet loss and then compared the results to a Cisco Catalyst 3750G-48TS switch. These are 48-port stackable Gigabit Ethernet switches.

To measure Layer 2 performance, the Tolly Group stacked four switches using 24 ports each and then stacked two switches using 48 ports each. The testers then put line-rate Gigabit Ethernet traffic on the 96 ports.

According to Tolly, in the first scenario, the 3Com switches lost 0% of frames at 64 bytes per frame, 0.1% with 512-byte frames and 0.2% with 1,518-byte frames. The Cisco switches lost 69.8% of 64-byte frames, 66.5% of 512-byte frames and 66.1% of 1,518-byte frames.

In the second scenario, losses for the 3Com gear ranged up to 4%, while losses on the Cisco gear ranged up to almost 70%, according to the Tolly report.

The Tolly Group then measured Layer 3 IP packet-forwarding performance. For this test, the group used a stack of four switches using 16 ports each, and a stack of two using 32 ports each. Line-rate Gigabit Ethernet traffic went onto the ports once again.

In the first scenario, the 3Com gear lost zero packets, while the Cisco switch lost up to 51% to 57% of packets.

In the second scenario, the 3Com gear experienced 1% packet loss when using the largest packet size. The packet loss for the Cisco gear ranged from 51% to 59%.

For the full, free report (free because 3Com wants you to see this, obviously), click here.

Jeff Caruso is site editor at Network World.