* Tolly Group compares Nortel, Cisco, HP ProCurve Ethernet switches
NetXen this week said it has integrated its 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters supporting Windows and Linux offload with HP’s ProLiant servers.
In all the hubbub over Interop last month, I missed this test from the Tolly Group: The testing firm compared the Nortel Ethernet Routing Switch 2526T and 2550T against the Cisco Catalyst 2960-24TC and 2960-48TC, and the HP ProCurve 2626 and 2650.
As always with the Tolly Group, remember that the organization is paid by a vendor – in this case, Nortel. However, Tolly bills itself as independent and unbiased; it runs its tests, gives the results to the sponsoring vendor, and leaves it up to the vendor to release the results or not.
The Nortel ERS 2500 series of switches are Layer 2/Layer 3-capable. The 2526T is a 24-port Fast Ethernet switch, and the 2550T is a 48-port Fast Ethernet switch. Both have four Gigabit Ethernet ports for uplinks.
Tolly said the Cisco and HP switches had comparable configurations, except that they had two fewer Gigabit Ethernet ports.
In its tests, Tolly found that the Nortel switches were able to forward frames 45% faster in the 24-port test and 16% faster in the 48-port test. The Nortel switches reached a bidirectional frame forwarding rate of 9.52 million frames per second in the 24-port test, compared to 6.55 million frames per second for both the Cisco and HP switches. In the 48-port test, the numbers were 11.6 million frames per second for Nortel and 10.12 million for Cisco and HP.
Tolly also noted that the cost per gigabit of throughput for the Nortel switches was a fraction of that of the Cisco switches. It was even better than that of the HP ProCurve switches, though not by as much.
If you are interested, you can view the full report here.
