Abstract

3Com Corp. commissioned The Tolly Group to benchmark its SuperStack 3 Switch 4300 versus the Cisco Systems, Inc. Catalyst 3548 XL switch in competitive Layer 2 Fast Ethernet/Gigabit Ethernet forwarding performance tests. The Tolly Group evaluated the steady-state, zero-loss (less than or equal to 0.001%) bidirectional (full-duplex) frames per second (fps) throughput of both switches in a full-mesh configuration. In addition to the standard frame sizes, engineers benchmarked the throughput of both switches when handling “odd-sized” frames of 65, 129 and 257 bytes, in order to provide results for the full-spectrum of frame sizes. The 3Com SuperStack 3 Switch 4300 was tested with 48 Fast Ethernet ports (100Base-TX) and four Gigabit Ethernet ports (1000Base-SX). The Cisco Catalyst 3548 XL was tested with 48 Fast Ethernet ports (100Base-TX) and two Gigabit Ethernet ports (1000Base-SX). Both devices were configured with 10 Fast Ethernet ports meshed with each Gigabit Ethernet port, and the remainder of the Fast Ethernet ports meshed with each other.