How we did it

We assessed the Catalyst 4948-10GE in terms of performance, security and features. We tested performance in six areas: throughput/latency in L2, L3, Open Shortest Path First and virtual LAN configurations; buffering capacity during congestion; and unicast MAC address capacity.

To test throughput and latency, we configured a Spirent SmartBits traffic generator/analyzer to offer traffic to all 48-Gigabit Ethernet switch ports in a fully meshed traffic pattern, while simultaneously offering traffic to both 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch ports in a port-pair traffic pattern. We repeated this test with nine Ethernet frame lengths: 64-, 128-, 256-, 512-, 1024-, 1280-, 1518-, 9000-, and 9216-byte frames. In all cases, we configured Spirent's TRT Interactive 5.0 application to offer traffic for 60 seconds, and recorded throughput and average latency measurements.

We ran these tests with the Catalyst 4948-10GE in L2 (bridging) and L3 (IP forwarding) configurations. We then enabled 1,344 virtual LANs on the Catalyst 4948-10GE (28 per Gigabit Ethernet port) and reran the same traffic pattern. We also tested with OSPF enabled. In the OSPF tests, we established one adjacency with each Gigabit Ethernet interface and advertised a total of 10,000 networks and offered traffic to 250 hosts on each network, for a total of 2.5 million flows.

To measure buffering capacity, we offered traffic at line rate to two Gigabit Ethernet switch ports, both destined to the same output port. We measured delay on the output port to determine buffer capacity. We then repeated the same test with a 10-to-1 overload.

To determine MAC address capacity, we used Spirent's SmartWindow application to offer various numbers of addresses in learning and test phases as described in RFC 2889.

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