Fast and Furious
I Tested The 4507R, the only model that comes with the option for redundant Supervisor cards. I tested this option by pulling out the active Supervisor card while pinging through the box. It took about 30 seconds for the backup Supervisor card to kick in and start forwarding the pings. However, with a large route table such a switchover could take as long as a minute, Cisco reps say. I also pulled one of the redundant power supplies while running our most demanding throughput tests, and the 4507R didn't drop a packet.
For my tests, the 4507R was fully populated with five line cards containing six gigabit-fiber ports on each. There were also two active gigabit-fiber ports on the Supervisor card for a grand total of 32 gigabit ports. I hooked up a Spirent SmartBits 6000B tester to the box and blasted true wire-speed traffic, 100 percent utilization, through all 32 ports in full-duplex mode. I sent 1,518-byte packets and the worst-case 64-byte packets, which caused the 4507R to process more headers in the same amount of time. I also sent some in-between-sized packets and set the SmartBits to tolerate 0 percent drops--not a single packet was dropped.
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Good
True wire-speed performance, even with access lists.
Heavy-duty redundancy. Inline power. Bad
Expensive.
Limited wire-speed port density. |
Next I configured a 30-line access list to be active on all the ports and specified that the whole list had to be traversed. The throughput was perfect, confirming Cisco's claim of wire-speed access-list processing. I left the access list on and did a latency test in full-mesh mode, which divided the traffic equally from each individual port to every other port and made the switch work a little harder. The best-case latency was about 3.4 microseconds with 64-byte packets. Even the worst case was low enough to be insignificant--about 73 microseconds with 1,518-byte packets.
Boosting the 4000
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
Maintaining existing network infrastructures often incurs huge technical debt before newer technologies are adopted over time.
Amid ongoing regional uncertainties, telecom infrastructure in the Middle East has expand to include terrestrial low-latency network infrastructure, which offers resilience and agility in navigating political complexities without relying solely on undersea networks.
