A Silicon Valley data center networking equipment tester announced successful completion of testing procedures for a new core switch based on a 100 Gigabit Ethernet platform. The new switch, manufactured by H3C, supports 40 GigE, 100 GigE and FCoE (Fiber Channel over Internet) links.

Emergence of technologies supporting 40 GigE/100 GigE capacity is in its beginning stages. According to analysts from Community Industry Researchers, while large companies like Google and Amazon are showing interest in 100 Gigabit Ethernet, "the actual (demand) volume for the near term is very low." Among the latest announcements of products that support such capacity were last month's 100 GigE service routing interface by Alcatel-Lucent and the successful testing of Hitachi's prototype 100 GE frame transmission system.

H3C's S12500 data center-class switch adopts distributed ingress cache technology to provide 200 ms data caching capability. It also adopts Intelligent Resilient Framework 2 (IRF2) design for virtualization of multiple high-end devices as one logical one. It supports independent control, detection and maintenance engines. A single switch provides 576 10GE ports for high-density data center environments.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Spirent Communications performed tests of the switch in its Spirent TestCenter, using its own testing platform. The tests included evaluation of the solution's forwarding performance of Layer 2, Layer 3, multicast and MPLS traffic on 128 10G ports, according to a Spirent statement. "The results demonstrate that the S12500 platform is capable of supporting line-rate 100 GigE traffic with zero packet loss, through superior forwarding performance, powerful caching capabilities and extremely high reliability and stability."

The Spirent TestCenter platform (image courtesy of Spirent)

Spirant spokeswoman Sailaja Tennati said the test center was designed specifically for testing data center solutions to deliver "realism in the lab environment. You can emulate certain conditions and create certain environments that you wouldn't want to happen after your system goes live." The center has recently introduced components for testing data center virtualization solutions.