Abstract

ACSYS commissioned The Tolly Group to evaluate the ACSYS TokenSwitch 3000 Bridge/Router, with the main focus on local Token Ring bridge performance under real-world enterprise conditions. The report emphasizes competitive throughput at multiple frame sizes and low bridge latency, positioning the TokenSwitch 3000 as a high-performance local Token Ring bridge for departmental connectivity and backbone access in complex LAN environments.  

The TokenSwitch 3000 is described as a two-port, multi-protocol bridge/router built on SMC’s Token Ring chipset. According to the product summary on page 3, it supports 4 or 16Mbit/s Token Ring, Source Route bridging, IEEE 802.1 Spanning Tree, TCP/IP and IPX routing, frame sizes up to 8,192 bytes, and management features including SNMP and IBM LAN Network Management. The unit provides two user-interconnect interfaces plus a management port and includes features such as flash memory, an LCD front panel, and in-band management with remote download and configuration.  

Tolly’s benchmark suite measured frame handling, throughput, and latency using Source Route bridge traffic across a wide range of frame sizes: 28, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1,024, 2,048, 4,096, and 8,192 bytes. As described in the methodology on page 3, two rings were configured and tested simultaneously to determine maximum unidirectional throughput without frame loss. The report highlights that the TokenSwitch 3000 was the fastest Token Ring bridge tested at 64-byte frames and that it operated at or near wire speed for 64-byte frames and above. The throughput chart on page 2 shows performance scaling from about 10.64Mbit/s at the smallest tested frame size to roughly 15.9 to 16.0Mbit/s across larger frame sizes, indicating that the bridge approached full Token Ring line-rate performance once frame-handling overhead diminished.  

Latency was another key result. Tolly measured single-frame latency with both single and multiple concurrent streams, and the report highlights extremely low latency overall. The discussion on page 4 explains that lower bridge latency directly improves response time for demanding applications, particularly in multi-bridge and multi-hop environments where delay compounds across the network path. Overall, the report presents the ACSYS TokenSwitch 3000 as a fast, low-latency local Token Ring bridge/router that combined near-wire-speed throughput with strong enterprise protocol and management support for 1994-era Token Ring infrastructures.  

Note: this document was scanned from the original printed report. While pages 3 and 4 of that original were missing, Tolly was able to restore those pages from a Quark layout file though the formatting for those two pages is not a final format. Also note that Tolly found a 1994 advertisement that was run in Network World highlighting the Tolly report. That was scanned and appended to this document.

[Note: for some reason the automatic thumbnail of page 1 does not generate correctly. We have to use a manually-created thumbnail.]