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Wednesday, May 14, 2008 9:28 AM/EST
In my May 5, 2008, story package on Cisco's 4900M 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch, I listed some of the drivers that I thought would make this high-bandwidth, direct-connect networking necessary. Among the things I listed were application consolidation, large format media files and compute-intensive applications. May 14, Network Instruments will release survey results that looks at survey results for 10GbE network adoption, talking about switch-to-switch (as compared to the switch-to-server focus of my review and story package). The survey basically shows that 10GbE networks are being implemented around the world and that one quarter of respondents said they will have some 10GbE networking in place by the end of 2008. For IT managers, the other factor driving 10GbE implementation is the price per port. 10GbE port prices are driving downward. This week I'm set to spend a day with the engineers at Arastra in preparation for a review of the...
Thursday, May 01, 2008 3:16 PM/EST
There are two big 10 Gigabit Ethernet "drops" coming out of Interop (held in Las Vegas, April 2008.) The first is price and the second is power. I talked with switch maker Arastra, which announced general availability of its 24- and 48-port 10G Ethernet switches in the approximately $400 per port price range. Ed Khatuka from optical communications at JDSU (JDS Uniphase) told me about 10G Ethernet transceivers that are going from 15 watts to 5.5 watts of power per port. These price and power reductions can approach important thresholds for data center managers who are considering a migration path to 10G Ethernet direct-attached networks for servers and storage (the convergence of server and storage networks continued at Interop as well). Here's an Intel blog post that I found useful in explaining transceiver technology and the alphabet soup of terms used in 10G Ethernet networking. Other 10 Gig products that...
Wednesday, April 30, 2008 6:55 PM/EST
In order to give Cisco's Catalyst 4900M switch a run for its money, I took the unit to Ixia's newly inaugurated iSimCity test and measurement center in Santa Clara, where I subjected the switch to Layer 2 and Layer 3 tests, alongside a set of power consumption tests. I conducted performance tests on a 4900M unit that was outfitted with two WS-X4904-10GE half cards that each carried four 10 Gigabit Ethernet fiber ports. Taken together with the 4900M's eight fixed 10GE ports, this brought my test unit to 16 ports of full line-rate 10GE capacity. I generated test traffic with Ixia's Optixia XM12 IP performance tester chassis with six LSM10GXM3-01 cards that each had three 10GE ports. I conducted all of the tests in store-and-forward mode, in which the frame size was subtracted from the latency calculation to single out latency introduced by the 4900M. Our first set of tests...
Tuesday, April 29, 2008 10:34 AM/EST
Proper planning and implementation are vital to the success of any enterprise IT deployment, but these issues loom particularly large for a product such as Cisco's Catalyst 4900M switch, which is meant both to serve a foundational role in your network infrastructure and to change--through its swappable card slots--as your organization shifts from 1G to 10G Ethernet. For implementation advice and detailed pricing breakdowns for the hardware that I tested in my Catalyst 4900M review, I worked with representatives from the San Francisco office of FusionStorm, a Cisco Gold Certified Partner with offices across North America. To be clear, Cisco provided the actual 4900M that I tested and also provided special engineering support to help ensure that product testing proceeded expeditiously. As I learned while working with FusionStorm, some seventy percent of the hardware costs of the Cisco 4900M switch tied up in the half cards and transceivers that an...
Tuesday, March 04, 2008 5:38 PM/EST
My colleague Michael Vizard covered Cisco's announcement of the ASR 1000 at CeBIT. I'm anxious to get a look at Cisco's new ASR 1000 Series Aggregation Services Router with Cisco IOS XE. The platform is supposed to be able to offer high availability for IPsec VPN, firewall services, NetFlow event logging, and DDoS detection and mitigation without stopping. Like I said, very interesting and I'm looking forward to getting a look at the device. In the meantime, poking around on Cisco's site yielded this gem for IT managers: a significant change in Cisco's maintenance policy for IOS XE. In the Cisco IOS XE Software End-of-Life Strategy document Cisco will start releasing IOS XE software every four months instead of waiting for a feature queue to fill as is the case for IOS. The good news is that this means network managers will be able to schedule maintenance on a predictable...
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