* Tolly Group measures HP blade switch performance
Last month the Tolly Group evaluated the HP BladeSystem PC Blade Switch, which is a Layer 2 device that provides communications for 20 blade PCs in the HP BladeSystem PC Blade Enclosure.
As usual with Tolly Group tests, the vendor whose equipment was evaluated was the vendor who funded the evaluation. But readers may find the results useful.
Tolly tested the switch’s interoperability with enterprise edge and aggregation switches, measured the Layer 2 zero-loss switching capacity of the switch, and gauged the maximum frame forwarding rate and total MAC addresses supported.
The zero-loss throughput was measured at 8.17Gbps for 1,518-byte frames and 7.76Gbps for 64-byte frames, the two ends of the spectrum (maximum and minimum frame size, respectively). For 64-byte frames, the switch achieved a zero-loss frame-forwarding rate of 11.4 million frames per second. And it could store up to 7,900 MAC addresses.
Tolly tested how well the switch interoperated with LAN switches from Cisco, Dell and Foundry Networks for several functions. I guess HP felt a need to prove that the blade switch could play well with other switches in a network.
Tolly verified that HP’s switch could work with others using Spanning Tree Protocol, Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol and Multiple Spanning Tree Protocol to reconfigure routing tables in the event of an outage or other network event. The testing firm also saw that the HP switch interoperated with Cisco’s implementation of Dynamic Link Aggregation using Link Aggregation Control Protocol, Per VLAN Spanning Tree (PVST), Rapid PVST and Multiple Spanning Tree Protocol.
The Tolly Group also verified many features of the HP switch, touching areas such as security, management and virtual LAN support. Full details of the tests can be found here.
