Abstract

3Com commissioned The Tolly Group to evaluate its CoreBuilder 7000HD in a number of tests involving Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) networking. The CoreBuilder 7000D supports four I/O slots and, according to 3Com, has a backplane capacity of 5Gbps. For this test, the device was outfitted with OC-12c (622mbps) ATM and Fast Ethernet cards. 

The CoreBuilder 700HD delivered scalable switch-to-switch layer 2 throughput of up to 3.5Gbps using four ATM LANE OC-12c links carrying 1,518-byte Fast Ethernet frames; switched 64-byte frames over four OC-12c links at over 5,240,000 fps - utilizing more than 92% of the OC-12c's usable bandwidth; Employed industry standard LANE 1.0 and an enhanced version of PNNI Phase 0 that provided redundant switch-to-switch links.