Dell switch tested

Vendors say lots of things about their equipment when they want to make a sale, so it helps in the buying process to get a third party to verify claims. The Tolly Group has performed a battery of tests against Dell’s recently announced PowerConnect 6024 that should help network managers evaluate this Layer 3 switch.

The work was commissioned by Dell, but the results are independent and are public. The tests were conducted in December, and the switch was launched in January:

https://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/lans/2004/0119lan1.html

Tolly found that the 24-port Gigabit Ethernet switch was able to move both Layer 2 and Layer 3 traffic at wirespeed, or 100% of the theoretical maximum.

The testing firm went a step further and determined the throughput with access control lists enabled, which added overhead. ACLs are tables that spell out what resources a particular user is allowed to access. In those tests, throughput hit 94% of the theoretical maximum.

The Tolly Group also verified many of the features of the switch. The product was able to:

* Distinguish and prioritize traffic based on the IEEE 802.1p standard.

* Utilize eight processing queues to deal out bandwidth in a weighted round-robin method.

* Use quality-of-service mechanisms to support voice communications.

* Detect the failure of a switch and fail over using Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol.

* Grant or deny access based on MAC or IP address.

Full details of the tests, including methodology, are available at:

https://www.tolly.com/DocDetail.aspx?DocNumber=204103