Abstract

Fujitsu, Ltd. commissioned The Tolly Group to evaluate its GeoStream R940 IP Switching Node, a high-performance router designed for use in Internet service provider backbone networks. Tolly Group engineers conducted a battery of tests ranging from an evaluation of system redundancy and interoperability of standard protocols (RIP/OSPF/BGP/MPLS), to baseline IP and MPLS forwarding and latency performance.

This Tolly Group performance evaluation examines the Fujitsu GeoStream R940 IP Switching Node, a carrier-class router designed for ISP backbone networks, with a focus on availability, interoperability, and forwarding performance for both IP and MPLS traffic. Tested in December 2001, the evaluation assessed protocol interoperability, fail-over behavior, online software upgrade continuity, baseline forwarding and latency, longest-match route lookups, and packet filtering.    

A central finding is that the GeoStream R940 maintained very high availability through hardware redundancy. In fail-over testing, simulated loss of half the duplicated power system produced zero downtime, while simulated processor-controller failure resulted in an average interruption of just 19.3 microseconds. Tolly also verified online software upgrade capability, finding that an active-to-standby controller switchover caused the loss of only 524 packets at an offered rate of 1,000,000 packets per second, equivalent to roughly 524 microseconds of interruption.    

The report also validated interoperability with Cisco 12012 and Juniper M5 routers for RIPv1/v2, OSPFv2, BGP4, and MPLS-LDP. In baseline performance testing, the GeoStream R940 achieved 100% of theoretical maximum throughput for 64-byte IP traffic, baseline MPLS forwarding, longest-match lookup tests, packet filtering, and IMIX traffic distributions in the 16-port Gigabit Ethernet configuration shown in the chart on page 2. Latency remained well below 1 millisecond, measuring 72.1 microseconds for baseline IP and 68.2 microseconds for baseline MPLS with 64-byte packets, and 165.3 and 161.5 microseconds respectively for IMIX traffic.    

Tolly concluded that route lookups with mixed-length prefixes did not reduce forwarding rates, and that packet filtering rules did not degrade throughput or increase latency while correctly allowing or denying traffic based on ingress or egress criteria. The report further states that each four-port Gigabit Ethernet line card could forward up to 2.5Gbit/s of traffic without packet loss, for a total system throughput of 20.1Gbit/s in a fully populated eight-module, 32-port configuration. Overall, the GeoStream R940 is presented as a high-performance, highly available router for backbone deployments requiring resilient IP and MPLS forwarding with no measurable penalty from advanced features.