Abstract

The demand for data center network performance continues to grow as multi-tenant, public/ private clouds and enterprise workloads require that Ethernet switches deliver higher levels of reliability and guaranteed service level agreements. In this environment, unexpected packet loss is unacceptable. In the past Ethernet switches could easily “pass” RFC2544 with no packet loss and did not exhibit large variances in latency. Today, however, that is not the case with some vendors’high-speed switches.

Designing a switch ASIC which operates at 40GbE or higher rates is a different type of challenge and this may be the reason for this new phenomenon where switches fail to pass the very basic RFC2544 at L2 or L3. Today, with the extensive usage of text and short messages, Web2 and large clouds are seeing increasing portions of very small packets which changes the way the network operates.

Mellanox commissioned Tolly to benchmark the 40 Gigabit Ethernet performance of the Mellanox SwitchX-2 ASIC, implemented in the Mellanox SX1036 switch and compare that to the performance of the Broadcom StrataXGS Trident II ASIC, implemented in the Arista Networks DCS-7050QX switch. The Mellanox solution delivered 40GbE wire-speed layer 2 performance with zero frame loss at all frame sizes tested in tests of up to 36 ports.