Abstract

One of the fundamental premises for building a data center, whether for Cloud or for traditional Enterprises, is that network infrastructure needs to be predictable in the way it performs. Predictability can be measured in the consistency of throughput regardless of the packet size or the type of applications the network is carrying. However, another aspect of predictability is for performance to stay consistent regardless of which ports are plugged in. A key aspect of the predictability of the network is how fairly traffic is divided when it is needed. Multiple applications and clients share the same infrastructure and when there is contention for example, when a microburst or incast (many-to-one) event occurs, the network needs to fairly divide the resources, buffers and bandwidth, in a predictable way. One application or client cannot be accidentally allowed to starve the other applications of network capacity. Unfortunately, not all switches divide traffic in a fair way.

Mellanox commissioned Tolly to benchmark the performance and predictability of the Mellanox Spectrum-based 100 Gigabit Ethernet switch and compare that to the performance and predictability of switches built by a leading network vendor with Broadcom’s StrataXGS Tomahawk ASIC. The Mellanox solution delivered wire speed layer 2/3 performance with zero packet loss in tests up to 32x 100GbE ports and fairly allocated resources in incast scenarios, where the Tomahawk switch failed in both cases. The Mellanox solution was able to fairly divide bandwidth.