HP's ProCurve 2800 series

HP's latest entries into the stand-alone Gigabit Ethernet switch space - the ProCurve 2824 and the 2848 models - offer a $100 per gigabit port price, but the trade-off is less than ideal performance levels.

These models sport 24 and 48 copper 10/100/1000Base-T ports, respectively, as well as a typical set of Layer 2 features and limited Layer 3 routing functionality. Each model is housed in single, rack-mountable units with Ethernet ports accessible from the front panel - which is organized well with each port having a LED showing link speed, activity and duplex status. The front panel also has power, fan, redundant power supply (RPS), and general fault indicators.

The Layer 2 features of these boxes include 802.1Q virtual LAN (VLAN) support, 802.1p packet prioritization and 802.1ad link aggregation. Our tests found that all the Layer 2 features worked well. In particular, the link aggregation tests proved that the switches can bundle several Ethernet links into a logical link for increased bandwidth and fault tolerance between switches.

The limited Layer 3 forwarding could be helpful in tying multiple VLANs to a routed network via a default IP route. For example, the switch can be configured to route between a maximum of eight VLANs. You can configure a total of 16 routes plus one default route. However, there is no support for any dynamic routing protocols such as Routing Internet Protocol or Open Shortest Path First.

Performance was disappointing for both switches.

To quantify a switch's throughput, we generally measure the maximum throughput it can handle before it starts dropping packets (see How we did it). The 2848 showed packet loss - albeit a miniscule amount - at very small loads. Therefore we couldn't measure throughput using our typical format. To fairly characterize throughput performance, we ran a packet-loss test with increasing loads.

The 2848 Layer 3 packet-loss test verified the constant small amount of loss seen in our initial test. The loss began increasing at 70% of the maximum load and it increased to 11.52% loss with 1,518-byte packets at 100% load. As the packet size decreased, the loss also decreased (see chart, right).