The market must be coming back

Tue May 21 04:14:30 UTC 2002

Chris:

> I've been thinking about leasing some dark fiber and running one of the
> new 10gigE blades for the Cat 6500 chassis.

Be careful here.  Last I tested (at one of our channels that also resells
Cisco) is that the 10GbE on the Catalyst 6500 hasn't broken 4G throughput
yet.  Sort of like buying a GbE interface for a 7200 (It only get's 10%
throughput...  Why waste the money, just buy FE!).  The GSR is up to about
8G throughput nowadays from what I've seen.

Foundry Networks (my company) can get a perfect clean 8G throughput on all
of our chassis with management modules M2 or above (we don't support 10GbE
on the legacy M1).  Our NG chassis will be available later in the year for
those folks that want 4 X 10 GbE on each module (8 slot chassis).  I expect
this will be a perfect 40G throughput since I've never seen us do anything
less than perfect (been working here since August).

Additionally, you would be the first customer I've heard about doing
standards based 10GbE on a Catalyst.  (feel free to chime in if you're doing
this... Can I bring my SmartBits 600 to your site to test throughput?).
Good luck!

Foundry has a few references:

Deployed:
http://www.foundrynet.com/about/newsevents/releases/pr4_3_02.html
http://www.foundrynet.com/about/newsevents/releases/pr4_2_02.html
http://www.foundrynet.com/about/newsevents/releases/pr2_11_02.html

Many others that we don't press release.  We've got these blades running in
production networks here in Japan that I'm not allowed to talk about.  Also
many other places.

Deploying:
http://www.foundrynet.com/about/newsevents/releases/pr5_8_02.html

Performance:
http://www.spirentcom.com/news/press.cfm?id=87

>  Throw in the Cisco "Flamethrower" GBIC and I should be good for 50 miles.
Has anyone tried
> this?

Foundry Network's Long Haul (LHB: 150 km, LHA: 70 km) Ethernet optics exceed
Cisco's on GbE (ZX: 100 km).  I'm sure we exceed them on the ER LAN PHY for
10GbE.  We've only tested to 85 kilometers (ER).  802.3ae standard is 40 km:

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/020508/nyw068_1.html

Cisco's website says they can do the 802.3ae standard 40 km on the 1550 nm
blade.  I'm not sure if the optics are changeable either:

http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/cc/pd/ifaa/6500ggml/

I doubt if there is a GBIC for 10GbE available.  We use the same blade with
changeable optics; however, I would not call the SR (300 meters), LR (10
km), and ER LAN PHY optics GBIC's...

Moral of this story is that BEFORE you buy these blades from Cisco (or
anybody), test them!  If you don't have 10GbE SmartBits or IXIA, you can use
1GbE interfaces and wrap them around until you get 8G (no need to produced
anything higher 'cause the Cat 6500 has an 8G throughput limitation).  Don't
test latency with this method :-).  I don't believe the marketing from any
company, not even my own.  I test, then tell.

I've personally never seen a packet drop at a steady 8G rate for up to 72
hours; however, one of our customers evaluating the 10GbE blades reported 2
64 byte packet's were dropped in a 12 hour line rate test.  I suspect they
had bad fiber.

Gary Blankenship
Systems Engineer
Foundry Networks