Abstract

NEC America, Inc. commissioned The Tolly Group to evaluate its BlueFire 700 Series Ethernet Switch, model 730, for Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet throughput, as well as to validate the device’s capability to allocate bandwidth to prioritized traffic in situations where ports experience severe congestion.

This Tolly Group performance evaluation examines the NEC BlueFire 700 Series Ethernet Switch model 730, a multilayer campus switch tested between June and August 2001 for both forwarding performance and Quality of Service behavior under congestion. The report focuses on two practical requirements for enterprise switching: zero-loss wire-speed Layer 2 and Layer 3 throughput, and the ability to protect delay-sensitive traffic such as voice when network ports become oversubscribed.  

In throughput testing, the BlueFire 730 delivered 100% of theoretical maximum wire-speed performance in both Gigabit Ethernet and Fast Ethernet configurations for 64-, 512-, and 1,518-byte frames. In a full-mesh 16-port Gigabit Ethernet test, the switch reached its theoretical full-duplex maximum of 32Gbit/s. The report lists aggregate Layer 2 Gigabit forwarding rates of 23,809,524pps for 64-byte frames, 3,759,398pps for 512-byte frames, and 1,300,388pps for 1,518-byte frames. In a fully configured 128-port Fast Ethernet setup, the switch again delivered wire-speed throughput, reaching a maximum theoretical throughput of 25.6Gbit/s and forwarding 19,047,426pps, 3,007,333pps, and 1,040,113pps for the same three frame sizes.    

The report places particular emphasis on QoS. In congestion tests where prioritized and non-prioritized traffic competed for the same outbound port, the BlueFire 730 preserved 100% throughput for the high-priority stream while throttling or completely starving lower-priority traffic as oversubscription increased. The chart on page 2 shows low-priority traffic falling from 80% delivery at 120% oversubscription to 0% at 200% oversubscription, while high-priority traffic remained at 100% throughout. Additional fair-queuing tests with multiple high-priority streams showed that the switch distributed loss evenly across contending ports rather than penalizing one stream disproportionately.    

Beyond forwarding and QoS, Tolly also verified support for VRRP, Spanning Tree, and Link Aggregation. Overall, the report presents the NEC BlueFire 730 as a high-performance multilayer switch that combines full line-rate forwarding with practical QoS controls for converged voice-and-data networks.