Cisco Nexus 9508 Switch Shines for 40GbE Aggregation in Switch Performance Tests

At the heart of the transition to cloud computing is on-demand provisioning of a wide variety of applications, linear scalability of resources, and non-stop operation at lower total cost. With the increasing frequency of rapid provisioning of data-intensive applications in the cloud, organizations are increasingly challenged to better scale and manage network and storage environments without business disruption. This necessitates a network that provides uniform latency, high bandwidth, full utilization of all paths, and configuration simplicity.

The Cisco Nexus® 9508 40GbE data center Ethernet switch was recently tested by Lippis report and turned in remarkable performance results, while supporting 288 40GbE ports for the highest 40GbE port density of any switch tested to date.  Cisco Nexus 9508 performed with the best overall store-and-forward latency of core switches tested to date, while providing consistent latency across all packet sizes at line rate. In addition, it demonstrated 100% throughput (i.e. without dropping a single packet!) across all 40GbE ports for a wide range of packet sizes. This is key to public and private cloud providers seeking aggregation and core networking technology that underpins large-scale, highly virtualized data centers and converged storage systems with support for disparate workloads having a wide range of performance requirements.

Use Cases

The industry-leading 40GbE density and performance of Cisco Nexus 9508 enables data center IT to upgrade aggregation network infrastructures from 10GbE to 40GbE to complement the shift in server networking from GbE to 10GbE. Having extremely impressive cross sectional bandwidth and latency numbers, the Cisco Nexus 9508 can also excel for aggregation and core infrastructure applications in traditional, cloud data centers as well as hyper-scale data center environments. Cisco Nexus 9508 is also optimal network infrastructure for high performance cluster computing applications, for example, for large-scale data analytics and low-latency trading applications.

Test Highlights

For unicast traffic, Cisco Nexus 9508 delivered store-and-forward latencies ranging from 1.6 microseconds for 64B packets used in transaction workloads to 3.5 microseconds for 9KB packets used in data-intensive, large-file applications. The latency variation ranged between 1 to 3 ns, allowing consistent latency across all packet sizes at line rate. These are by far the lowest latency measurements observed by Lippis Report in core switches to date (the previous record for modular switch latency was 2.2 to 11.9 microseconds, at the same packet range, however at much less density).

For IP multicast traffic, the Cisco Nexus 9508 demonstrated store-and-forward latencies ranging from 1.6 microseconds for 64B packets to 3.5 microseconds (3465.3 ns) for 9KB packet forwarding IP multicast traffic faster than any other core switch observed in Lippis core switch tests.

The Cisco Nexus 9508’s congestion management is excellent at nearly 78% of aggregated forwarding rate as percentage of line rate during congestion conditions for L3 traffic flows, but when considering the density of ports supported and sheer magnitude of the traffic flow, the Cisco Nexus 9508 achieved congestion management at a scale never before attempted.

The Cisco Nexus 9508 also demonstrated 100% throughput as a percentage of line rate across all 288 40GbE ports for unicast traffic. In other words, not a single packet was dropped while the Cisco Nexus® 9508 was presented with enough traffic to populate its highly dense 288 40GbE ports at line rate.

The full report can be found here:

Following are links to webcasts providing highlights of unicast and multicast support of Cisco 9000:
Nexus 9000 Unicast forwarding  by Lilian Quan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ghw3KUEbaIk&feature=youtu.be

Nexus 9000 Multicast forwarding  by Lilian Quan