This is not good for CSCO. Foundry, Extreme and Compaq taking the leads here. AOL is deploying Foundry and many ISPs/Enterprises are starting to deploy Extreme and Compaq switches also. CSCO is likely to face tremendous price pressure, and with PE of more than 115 it is way overpriced. all imo.
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March 08, 1999, Issue: 1005
Section: Reviews
Foundry's FastIron II Forges Past Midrange Layer 3 Rivals
Joel Conover
In the high-speed networking market, Layer 3 switches are rapidly moving
toward commodity status. Fierce competition is driving down prices and
vendors are blurring the lines with nearly identical feature sets. This is
especially true for fixed-configuration Layer 3 devices, which have robust
feature sets but limited expandability. Today's Layer 3 100-Mbps switch
ports cost less than Layer 2 10-Mbps switch ports did just two years ago.
Low-cost ASICs have led to rich feature sets and dazzling performance at
very affordable prices.
We invited vendors to submit fixed-configuration Layer 3 products. The
products had to support 10/100 Fast Ethernet interfaces, as well as the OSPF
routing protocol. We received switches from Allied Telesyn International,
Compaq Computer Corp., Extreme Networks and Foundry Networks.
We also received responses from several other major players. Cisco Systems
said it didn't have a fixed-configuration Layer 3 switch at the time of our tests.
Nortel Networks' Bay Networks division was hesitant to participate after our
last review (see "Gigabit Ethernet Switches Set To Take on the Enterprise," at
www.networkcomputing.com/916/916r1. html), claiming that its
first-generation silicon didn't stack up against some of the competition's newer
hardware. The Alcatel-Packet Engines merger was cited as the reason for
Packet Engine's lack of a product. Cabletron Systems stated it didn't have the
necessary resources to participate. Holontech and CNET submitted products,
but they didn't meet our entry requirements.
Are all Layer 3 switches created equal? At first glance, they all offer the
similar bells and whistles: 802.1Q VLANs (virtual LANs), 802.1p QoS
(Quality of Service) and 10/100 autonegotiation are common to most Layer 3
switches. All the Layer 3 switches we tested claimed to support 802.1p and
802.1Q priority and VLAN tagging standards. However, these products have
been around longer than the ratified standards, so we were suspicious. We
found that Foundry's NetIron router did not properly support 802.1p tagging.
The company's engineers confirmed that the NetIron router's hardware was
designed before the standard had been ratified and did not fully support the
final standard. Foundry's FastIron II also did not fully support 802.1p-tagged
frames, though a software update will correct the problem. Extreme's
products honored 802.1p frames perfectly.
Each of the products we tested also support QoS on a per-port basis. We
were able to configure all switches to provide this type of QoS. Moving up the
OSI model, we also tested each product's ability to assign QoS based on
MAC (Media Access Control) address. Both Foundry and Extreme
supported this feature. The Extreme product supported QoS based on
destination address, while the Foundry products supported QoS based on
source or destination IP address. Both vendors' products successfully
assigned QoS based on IP address.
Foundry also supported the ability to classify traffic based on Layer 4 TCP
and UDP port numbers. We tested this functionality and found that it worked
on Foundry's FastIron II, but caused serious performance degradation on its
NetIron product. Extreme did not support this traffic classification.
In the end, Foundry Networks' FastIron II router received our Editor's
Choice award for having the richest feature set and an unbeatable price.
Extreme Networks' Summit48 finished a close second. Our tests were
designed to investigate these switches' QoS and access-control features. The
results revealed that though some differences in feature functionality exist, the
biggest point of competition by far is price.
Foundry Networks NetIron Switching Router and FastIron II
Foundry Networks submitted two products for this roundup. The NetIron
Switching Router is a 16-port 10/100 switch with two optional Gigabit
Ethernet uplinks. The FastIron II, our Editor's Choice, is a 72-port switch
with two, four or eight Gigabit Ethernet ports in a chassis-like form factor.
Both products have the same feature set, though the bigger FastIron II has a
much larger backplane.
Unlike the Extreme products, the NetIron and FastIron II products are
designed to act more like routers than switches, which is apparent from the
former's name and from the switch configuration: Out of the box, each
interface on the switch is configured to be a router port. To enable Layer 2
bridging, you must first create a VLAN and then assign a virtual interface to it.
Foundry's command-line interface bears a striking resemblance to Cisco's
IOS (Internetwork Operating System) software. Users familiar with the
interface and hierarchy will be pleased to see how quickly they can adapt to
the Foundry gear.
In our tests, the NetIron router demonstrated significantly less horsepower
than the FastIron II. Many of the QoS and filtering features available on the
NetIron had significant performance impact on the NetIron's overall
throughput. These same filters had no detrimental effects on the FastIron II.
Foundry engineers explained that the NetIron is based on older,
first-generation hardware, and that many of the new features had been moved
into hardware ASICs on the FastIron II platform. Foundry's NetIron lists for
$8,995, and the pair of uplinks is $3,695. This works out to about $700 per
port, a steep price for such a small box.
The NetIron didn't properly handle 802.1p frames from our Windows NT
workstations. Internally, the NetIron has only two hardware queues, so only
two levels of priority are supported for 802.1p QoS. Two levels of QoS
leaves little room for granularity of network traffic-packets are either high
priority or no priority. Enabling VLANs on the NetIron caused a 5 percent
decline in our test benchmarks. Enabling Layer 4 QoS on the uplink port
limited throughput to around 200,000 packets per second. At sites where
significant filtering or prioritization will take place, this could be a serious
liability. The FastIron II suffered no such problems.
FastIron II's bottom three slots are filled with 24-port modules that ship with
the product. Starting at $14,995 for 72 ports and two gigabit uplinks, the
price per port ranges from $202 per port with two gigabit uplinks to $331 per
port with eight gigabit uplinks. The unit commands $2,000 per gigabit port, a
price slightly higher than that of other products in this category, but the
features more than make up for the additional cost.
The FastIron II is everything you could want in a Layer 3 switch, and more.
The switch supports advanced filtering and QoS features not found in any
other Layer 3 switch we've tested. At Layer 2, the switch can filter or assign
QoS to frames based on MAC source or destination address; at Layer 3, via
IP source or destination; and at Layer 4, via TCP or UDP (User Datagram
Protocol) port number. Four levels of hardware priority match Extreme's
Summit offerings.
Foundry's switches are rich in features. They can route IPX 802.3 and 802.2
frames in hardware, and software-route IPX Ethernet II and Snap frames.
They also support AppleTalk routing (the only switches that do so). This
makes Foundry's switches an ideal replacement for large-scale enterprises
with Ethernet backbones.
In addition to multiprotocol routing, Foundry switches support route filtering, a
feature Extreme won't support until its next release. Route filtering lets you
control and filter the routes on your network, and deny routes you may not
want to be accessible from all locations.
The FastIron II and NetIron also support port-mirroring. While Extreme's
products support filtering on data output, the Foundry products let you select
data in, data out or both, but no filters on the monitor port. Like Extreme,
Foundry supports Web-based management. Most features of the switch can
be configured from the Web-based management, though we found the
command-line interface easier to use. Foundry also ships a standalone
application that can be used to configure the switch from any Windows NT
workstation. This software is more of an element manager than an enterprise
management program. It will let you manage multiple switches, but does not
provide a logical map-instead, it offers a pull-down list of available switches
on your network.
Extreme Networks Summit24 and Summit48
Extreme Networks submitted its Summit24 and Summit48 workgroup Layer
3 switches. The Summit24 is a 24-port 10/100 Fast Ethernet switch with a
single Gigabit Ethernet uplink. The Summit48 is the Summit24's bigger
brother, featuring 48 10/100 ports and two gigabit uplinks. The Summit24 has
one additional physical-layer redundant gigabit uplink; the Summit48 has two.
Many of the features located on the Foundry router were still in beta on the
Extreme switch, giving Foundry a slight edge in features. Likewise, Foundry's
price per port was slightly better than Extreme's when compared with two
gigabit uplinks.
The Extreme Summit24 and Summit48 list for $9,495 and $11,995,
respectively, and include the GBIC Gigabit Ethernet media adapters necessary
to connect them to your network, as well as the Layer 3 routing code feature.
The switches are also sold without Layer 3 code for about $4,000 less. With
Layer 3 routing enabled, the Extreme offerings list for $380 a port and $240 a
port, respectively.
The Extreme switches were designed as switches first and routers second.
Out of the box, the Summit24 and Summit48 come configured as a single, flat
switching domain. An administrator can configure routing interfaces as he or
she sees fit, grouping ports into logical router interfaces, or assigning each port
to its own IP subnet. Multinetting (supporting more than one subnet on a single
interface) is supported on Summit switches, but must first be enabled on a
global level before configuring interfaces for multiple IP subnets.
Extreme's switches have four distinct hardware queues that are used to
provide QoS on the network. Extreme's QoS features differ significantly from
Foundry's. For starters, QoS is a function of minimum and maximum
bandwidth on Extreme's switches, while Foundry's is relative only to other
traffic crossing the switch. Extreme's offerings let you create up to 32 QoS
profiles. Each profile can specify a minimum amount of bandwidth to be
guaranteed to an application, and a maximum amount that the application is
allowed to consume. This traffic can also be classified as normal, medium,
medium-high or high priority. QoS profiles can be set based on the port that
the traffic enters on, the VLAN that the traffic enters from, the destination IP
address of the host, or the MAC destination address specified in the packet.
We tested all four types of QoS classifications, and found that they all
functioned as expected, and at wire speed.
During our tests, we took advantage of Extreme's port-mirroring function to
determine whether tagged packets were indeed being sent by the 3Com
NICs. Once you have established a mirroring port on the Extreme switches,
up to eight mirroring filters can be added. These allow you to mirror traffic
based on port, VLAN or MAC address. All traffic destined to or from the
selected port, VLAN or MAC address is copied to the port for each filter,
which makes troubleshooting a breeze.
The Summit48 and Summit24 have limited filtering capabilities. The switch can
"blackhole"-discard-traffic based on destination MAC address or destination
IP address.
Extreme's Web-based management lets you configure many aspects of the
switch, including VLANs, IP routing, RIP (Routing Information Protocol),
OSPF and multicast features.
Extreme also offers the Extreme Enterprise Manager (EEM), a Java-based
Web package that is installed on an NT or Sun Web server. From EEM you
can manage multiple Extreme Summit and Black Diamond switches from a
single point of presence. We tested beta version 1.1 of EEM for NT. EEM
does not support autodiscovery, so it is necessary to add each switch to the
software manually. Extreme has made this job easier by letting you add
several switches at a time via a dialog.
Once the software was configured, we were able to create and manipulate IP
subnets and VLANs across our entire test bed. EEM lets you view your
subnets and VLANs as logical entities, as opposed to viewing the
configuration data of each individual switch. After configuring several new
VLANs, we were able to apply the changes to both switches in our test setup.
EEM configured each switch with the appropriate data behind the scenes. Our
testing showed EEM to be a valuable tool for enterprise network management
of Extreme devices. More than just a show-and-tell tool, it really helps
simplify device configuration. It also lets you monitor and view the health of
your network, and includes a Web-based telnet client that lets you access the
switch console from a Web browser to configure options not available in the
Web-based menus.
When our testing began, Extreme was shipping version 2.1.2b3 code. Near
the end of our tests, the company released a beta version of its 4.0 code.
Although we didn't test the new features in this code, the vendor informed us
of the many new features that had been added to this release. Some of the
more important ones include filtering and QoS prioritization based on Layer 4
TCP/UDP port numbers, OSPF ASBR (Autonomous System Boundry
Router) support, route filtering, route redistribution, trusted hosts and
software-based IPX routing. We will test this code in our upcoming review of
chassis-based Layer 3 switches.
The products sent from Compaq and Allied Telesyn are OEMs of Extreme's
hardware. Allied Telesyn offers a 16-port 10/100 switch with a single gigabit
uplink. Like the Extreme offering, the Allied Telesyn ATI-8518 has a
redundant gigabit uplink. Allied Telesyn offers no additional value to its
product, thus it is included only in our features chart. Compaq bundles the
product with enhanced management options.
Compaq Computer Corp. Compaq Enterprise Switch 5450
Compaq resells Extreme's Summit48 switch as the Compaq Enterprise Switch
5450. Compaq offers additional management options, but the hardware
remains the same. We tested Compaq's Network Management software on
the 5450 to compare management capabilities. Compaq provides a unique
package that provides added functionality, including autodiscovery and
network health management.
Compaq's management software consists of a Windows NT Server back end
and a Java-based panel-view application. Unlike Extreme's EEM, the
Compaq Management software supports device autodiscovery. After
installing the management software, we had it discover our two Compaq
switches. In addition, it discovered the Compaq Professional Workstation
from which we ran our management consoles and benchmarks.
Compaq's Network Management software more closely represents a typical
SNMP management package than Extreme's configuration tool. Using the
Compaq software, we were able to monitor SNMP alarms, and track
RMON history, events, alarms and statistics from the Compaq switches. In
addition, we were able to call up a device view of the switch, where we could
view and configure ports on the switch. The Compaq Network Management
software is not a replacement for Extreme's built-in Web server or
command-line interface, but rather a tool to help you manage Compaq's
networking and workstation/ server product lines. For customers interested in
simple networkwide management, the Compaq Network Management
Software is a terrif-ic deal. Compaq's switch carries a street price of about
$12,995, or about $1,000 more than Extreme's list price. Its list prices were
not available.
Send your comments on this article to Joel Conover at jconover@nwc.com
We would like to thank the following vendors for providing test equipment:
Ganymede Software for its Chariot Network Performance Application; IXIA
Communications for its IXIA Model 1600 Traffic Generator; Midnight
Networks for its Avalanche Network Routing Simulator; Optivision for its
LiveSystem mpegNet(R) MPEG2 Network Video Encoder; Pioneer for its
DVL-909 DVD/Laser Disc Player; and Shomiti Systems for its Shomiti
Century LAN Analyzer. |
