In partnering with standard bodies, independent test labs, and industry forums, Spirent contributes to the advancement of new technology and test methodologies. Spirent solutions have continued to be the first choice of customers when considering a public test of their products.
Public Tests—2011
08/11: Palo Alto PA-5060 is one fast firewall, but UTM, SSL features put a brake on performance
Palo Alto has shaken up the firewall market with its "application aware" feature, and we found that this next-generation capability carries no performance penalty. The PA-5060 does application-layer inspection by default. On the other hand—and this is a pretty big caveat—UTM rates were nowhere near the device's stated 20Gbps limit. Performance was far lower with any UTM feature enabled than when the PA-5060 operated in firewall-only mode.
07/11: Powerful stuff: New Cisco switch delivers 60 watts to the desktop
New line cards for the Catalyst 4500 switches support Universal Power Over Ethernet (UPoE), a means of supplying up to 60 watts per switch port. That's enough to power all devices in a cubicle, including a 23-inch monitor, thin-client computer and webcam-equipped IP phone.
We lit up all that gear in this exclusive Clear Choice test, and also examined performance and features of a new Supervisor 7-E management module and an energy-efficient Ethernet line card that drops power consumption when idle. Together, these transformed a venerable Catalyst 4500 from modular Ethernet switch to master power-distribution system.
07/11: Force10 data center switch delivers impressive performance
Network World tested the Force10 S4810 top-of-rack switch. It was a chance to evaluate a system built on merchant silicon, which is becoming more common in data center switches in recent years. The Network World test revealed some interesting results. The S4810 delivered high throughput and low latency with high port density, just what one would expect from a merchant-silicon-based platform, and just what is needed in a top-of-rack switch. However, some issues with the silicon surfaced in three or four targeted areas.
06/11: Cisco ASA 5585-X vs. Juniper SRX3600
Cisco engaged Miercom to evaluate the performance of the ASA 5585-X SSP-60 Adaptive Security Appliance. The ASA 5585-X was tested in a variety of scenarios to determine the maximum TCP and UDP throughput performance. Parameters recorded included CPU utilization, allocated memory utilization, connections per second (CPS), concurrent connections, real world HTTP throughput, and TCP EMIX traffic. We performed the identical tests on a Juniper SRX3600 Services Gateway to compare and contrast the performance of these products. In addition, we also measured the power consumption of each appliance while under load.
04/11: Cisco Nexus 3064 Lab Test Report
Cisco requested Miercom to conduct an independent third-party performance test of the Cisco Nexus 3064 switch. The testing focused on evaluating the switch with various full load traffic profiles and included measurements of latency, jitter and packet loss with for 64-, 128-, 256-, 512-, 768-, 1024-, 1280-,1516-, 4096- and 9216-byte frames. Typical real world application scenarios of pair unicast, full-mesh multicast, full-mesh unicast and multicast were used in the testing for this report.
03/11: Network Instruments® GigaStorTM 10 Gb Wire Speed: 10 Gigabit Ethernet Capture Performance Evaluation
The price and performance benefits of 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) have accelerated its use in enterprise and service provider networks. With it, though, 10GbE brings a torrent of traffic that can overwhelm a typical network trace tool in seconds. In fact, a fully-loaded 10GbE network can generate over a terabyte of data bi-directionally every seven minutes. Network Instruments commissioned Tolly to evaluate the performance of its GigaStor 10 Gb Wire Speed network data recorder. Specifically, tests were focused on illustrating 100% sustained data capture at full-duplex, 10 Gbps data rates.
02/11: MPLS and Ethernet World Congress 2011 Public Interoperability Event
EANTC presented the results of their MPLS & Ethernet interoperability test live at Upperside's MPLS & Ethernet World Congress in Paris (February 8-11, 2011). The tests focused on interworking of IP/ MPLS and MPLS-TP, Ethernet Ring Protection (ERPS), and a variety of device roles for 1588 clock synchronization. Based on the ratification of the IEEE 802.3ba standard EANTC has also successfully tested 100 Gigabit Ethernet using 100GBASE-LR4 interfaces.
