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Technology Stocks : MRV Communications (MRVC) opinions? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Regis McConnell who wrote (6269)	12/6/1997 9:56:00 AM
From: signist	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 42804

Interesting article Regis. I quess we can't argue or wish away facts, but did I miss something? I didn't see how he graded Bay's switch? Did you find the article a little too bias towards Bay's switch; <"In addition, we were disappointed to discover that the MegaSwitch does not support a redundant power supply. (The BayStack also lacks such redundancy.)">...or simply the author's innocent choice of words, here. I'm not suggesting anything the author wrote was not true. This is the first thing I have read that is flat out negative for MRVC (assuming tests were conducted properly) but this doesn't seem unfixable. John LoBianco

To: Regis McConnell who wrote (6269)	12/6/1997 1:21:00 PM
From: Dan Spillane	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42804

There also appears to be a "flaw" in their testing scheme. Nowhere in their test do they seem to push either switch to the 2 million (NBASE) or 1.6 million (BAY) pps limits, as far as I can see. They just loaded the network, and concluded that both switches handled traffic equally well. What happens to the BAY switch when 1.6m pps is reached? Doesn't the NBASE switch continue to perform well to 2.0m? Perhaps they stopped testing at 1.6m? Come on... One important thing to add. The BAY switch is considered just about the best in terms of price/performance. What this article shows is the MRVC switch is cheaper than the best, and apparently faster (if the proper tests were done). And as for the complaint about switch configuration utiltites on the NBASE switch -- almost always this is set up once when the switch is installed and no one bothers with it for months or years, if ever. So you are going to pay all that extra money for something that only matters once? I don't think so. Finally, I remember a negative press article last quarter (or before) which claimed that the NBASE switch dropped packets. What happened to that...in this latest test it was concluded there was no packet loss in either the BAY or NBASE switches? Seems to me that some of these stories go to the highest advertising bidder... *** From the text: Interestingly, our tests showed the two switches posting almost identical numbers, even though Nbase claims the MegaSwitch can handle 2 million packets per second, compared with the BayStack's advertised 1.6 million packets per second. (WHAT EXACT DATA THROUGHPUT WAS TESTED, GUYS? WHERE'S A GRAPH OR TABLE?) We used Ziff-Davis Benchmark Operations' NetBench 4.01 to measure each switch's performance, handling the traffic generated by 120 Dell Computer Corp. Dimension XPS 200n Pentium Pro machines sending and requesting various packet sizes from a Dell PowerEdge 4200 equipped with 256MB of RAM and dual 300MHz Pentium II processors, all on one subnet.