* Tolly Group reports on Nortel’s Terabit Cluster Solution
It has been a while since I’ve highlighted a report from The Tolly Group, which many readers found useful. Tolly recently evaluated Nortel’s Terabit Cluster Solution, which the testing firm describes as a combination of resilient hardware and software in Nortel’s Ethernet Routing Switch 8600.
As always, I should note that Nortel itself commissioned Tolly to evaluate the system and publish the results.
Tolly focused on the resiliency of the system, particularly with regard to supporting multimedia traffic. The firm found that it provides sub-second failover when there are failures; Tolly notes that this is a huge advantage over Spanning Tree, which can take up to 32 seconds to recover when a link goes down.
The test is an affirmation of Nortel’s Split Multi Link Trunking, or SMLT, which is the technology behind Nortel’s sub-second recovery. Tolly also tested SMLT with multimedia traffic that requires multicast support and said there was “minimal loss in video frames and quality.”
Tolly found that the system can move 649 million frames per second in two directions, with latency under 25 microseconds, even at Layer 3. The firm notes that this figure is well within the ITU-T specification for multimedia traffic. Tolly took these measurements across three hops.
The ITU-T G.1010 specification says that packet loss must be less than 1%, while the loss for the Nortel system came in at 0.88%.
For full details, the abstract and link to the PDF of the free report can be found here:
