The Tolly Group, Spirent Certify H3C S12500

3Com Corporation has announced its next-generation H3C S12500 large core/ data centre switching platform demonstrated efficient network performance while delivering resiliency and reliability in separate tests. The Tolly Group, an independent testing organisation, as well as tests conducted with Spirent’s TestCenter platform, both validated the S12500’s ability to deliver reliability, density and performance needed to support today’s mission-critical data centre network operations.

According to The Tolly Group, the H3C S12508 meets the demanding requirements of today’s data centre networks, while also future proofing these networks to address emerging next-generation requirements. Tolly engineers certified more than 120 features including high availability, multicast and reliability features on the S12500 under the ‘Tolly Certified’ program, which confirms for customers the 3Com solution has been independently certified to perform in the most rigorous data centre environments. Spirent evaluated the forwarding performance of Layer 2, Layer 3 (IPv4 and IPv6), multicast and MPLS traffic on 128 ports of 10 GE (Gigabit Ethernet), as well as cache testing with bursting traffic.

The test results revealed that under all these traffic scenarios the H3C S12518 delivered line-rate performance across all 128 10 GE (non-blocking) ports with zero packet loss. The ability for a data centre switch to provide this level of performance is critical to ensure bandwidth optimisation and quality of service (QoS) guarantees, especially in complex scenarios such as virtualised networks.

Performance

In both tests, the S12500 demonstrated superior performance for layer 2, layer 3 (for both IPv4 and IPv6) and MPLS. The Spirent test validated the H3C S12518 supported 100 percent throughput with zero packet loss across 128 10 GE (non-blocking) ports while forwarding L2 unicast, L3 IPv4 unicast, L3 IPv6 unicast, and L3 MPLS traffic.

Advanced video support

Both tests validated the multicast support of the S12500. Specifically, The Tolly Group validated support of up to 16,384 IPv4 and 4,095 IPv6 multicast groups and the Spirent test confirmed wirespeed to 128 10GE ports for Layer 3 IPv4 and IPv6 with zero packet loss. This confirms the S12500 provides the kind of performance needed by customers, who are streaming video, IPTV and other advanced multicast services.

Resiliency

Both tests confirmed the S12500’s resiliency in high-capacity networks. The Tolly Group test validated wirespeed performance with no packet loss while switching between the primary and back-up management modules and with redundant switching fabrics. In addition, for MPLS, the S12500 demonstrated a failover time of less than 27.1 milliseconds. The Spirent test confirmed that H3C’s Intelligent Resilient Framework (IRF) capability allowed two switches to be managed as one larger logical device creating a resilient virtual switching fabric that simplifies operations and increases overall network resiliency.