Abstract

Sun Microsystems, Inc. commissioned The Tolly Group to evaluate its GigaSwift Ethernet MMF Adapter v. 3.0, a Gigabit Ethernet adapter with a PCI bus architecture and a multimode fiber physical interface, against a SysKonnect GmbH SK-9843 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter, also with a PCI bus architecture and multimode fiber network interface. Each adapter under test was installed on a Sun Microsystems Enterprise 6500 server, outfitted with twelve 400-MHz UltraSPARC CPUs and running Sun’s Solaris 8 operating system.

Sun Microsystems’ GigaSwift Ethernet MMF Adapter is presented as a high-performance Gigabit Ethernet multimode fiber server adapter for Solaris environments, and this Tolly evaluation compares it directly with the SysKonnect SK-9843 in a Sun Enterprise 6500 server. The goal was to measure TCP/IP application throughput in both bidirectional and download scenarios using 1,518-byte packets, with multiple Gigabit Ethernet clients driving the adapter under sustained load.  

In the bidirectional test under Solaris 8, the Sun GigaSwift Ethernet MMF Adapter delivered 821Mbit/s of throughput, compared with 563Mbit/s for the SysKonnect SK-9843. In the download test, the Sun adapter reached 944Mbit/s versus 677Mbit/s for the SysKonnect card. Based on the report’s figures, Sun outperformed SysKonnect by about 45% in bidirectional TCP/IP traffic and by nearly 40% in TCP/IP file downloads. These results place the Sun adapter much closer to wire-speed Gigabit Ethernet performance in this server configuration.  

The test environment was built around a Sun Enterprise 6500 server with twelve 400MHz UltraSPARC CPUs and 4GB of RAM running Solaris 8 in 64-bit mode. The adapter under test was installed in a 66MHz PCI slot and configured for full duplex. Four Sun Enterprise 4500 client systems, each with eight 400MHz UltraSPARC processors and Sun Gigabit adapters, generated traffic through an Extreme Networks Alpine 3808 Gigabit Ethernet switch. NetIQ Chariot 4.0 was used to run modified file-send scripts in three-minute test iterations, and results were averaged across three runs.  

The report highlights that adapter throughput is influenced not only by hardware design, but also by operating system behavior, device drivers, packet size, and traffic direction. Tolly attributes the strong performance partly to the 64-bit, 66MHz PCI bus and checksum offload capabilities. Overall, the evaluation positions the Sun GigaSwift MMF Adapter as the stronger of the two multimode fiber Gigabit Ethernet options tested for Sun Solaris server deployments requiring the highest possible server-side throughput.  

Sun Microsystems was acquired by Oracle in 2010 and ceased to exist as an independent company. Oracle kept and continued parts of Sun’s technology portfolio, including Java, Solaris, SPARC servers, MySQL, and storage systems, while the Sun brand itself was gradually phased out.