Digital Equipment Corporation com- missioned The Tolly Group to bench-mark the switching throughput and latency

characteristics of the Digital Equipment Corporation MultiSwitch 900 switching chassis. The Tolly Group tested Fast Ethernet switching throughput in a single MultiSwitch 900 chassis configured with eight VNswitch 900XXs as well as throughput and latency in a multi-topology switching configuration involving Fast Ethernet, FDDI, and ATM. Testing was performed in September of 1997.

Test results show that the MultiSwitch 900 delivered aggregate throughput that exceeded 2.2 Gbit/s in single switching chassis performance tests, and delivered wire speed performance and store-and-forward latency as low as 17 microseconds (μs) in MultiSwitch 900 to MultiSwitch 900 multi-topology performance tests.

The Tolly Group benchmarked the steady-state throughput of the MultiSwitch 900 when forwarding 26 simultaneous Fast Ethernet streams. The goal of this test was to measure the maximum Fast Ethernet switching capacity of a MultiSwitch 900 configured with 8 VNswitch 900XXs. Traffic traversed the switch via inter-module, and intra-module paths.