HP raising the bar on router performance: Tested with Spirent
By Sam Rastogi, Global Product Marketing Manager, HP, and Rajesh Rajamani, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Spirent
To take advantage of emerging applications, you need a vendor that offers a comprehensive enterprise router portfolio to enable high-performance services for users across hundreds and thousands of sites.
HP MSR Series and HP 6600 Router Series provide high performance WAN routing with comprehensive routing features like MPLS, dynamic routing, IPv6, QoS, switching and security services with flexible connectivity options all integrated on a single modular routing platform.
Behind-the-scenes look: the HP-Spirent collaboration
I collaborated with Rajesh from Spirent to design a test bed to emulate a large-scale enterprise network based on extreme conditions and network complexity. We worked to test the HP 6600 Router Series and HP MSR Series routers in Spirent’s proof-of-concept (POC) lab in Sunnyvale, CA last month.
Spirent equipment subjected the HP routers to a series of tests to stretch the limits of the HP MSR50-60 and HP 6608 routers.
Realism under scale
Spirent’s unique topology emulation, complex traffic generation and results analysis capabilities helped subject the HP routers to realistic traffic conditions and demonstrate performance and feature robustness. The Spirent equipment emulated tens of thousands of hosts and routers connected in complex topologies. Not only did Spirent TestCenter originate and terminate 108+ million packets per second and 74 Gbps traffic, but also ensured that the traffic originated from tens of thousands of unique hosts – typical in your real-world enterprise networks.
HP router testing with Spirent TestCenter
Spirent TestCenter generated a forwarding test to illustrate extreme load conditions in which tens of thousands of users are accessing network and applications resources simultaneously on the campus network.
This test configuration utilized the HP 6608 router with three SAP-48 modules. This test went beyond port-to-port forwarding and utilized the full BGP routing table across 74 GE ports.
Here’s a couple screen shots of the forwarding test from the Spirent TestCenter in which 108+ million packets per second of IPv4 routing traffic was generated on the HP 6608 router.
110+ Mpps forwarding on HP 6608 router
74 Gbps of line rate forwarding
The test also demonstrated one of the most powerful attributes of the HP 6600 Series Routers – the distributed multi-core processing architecture – that enables high throughput performance and scaling by adding multiple line cards in the system.
Spirent TestCenter also generated a mix of IPv4 and IPv6 traffic on the MSR50-60 router with the G2 MPU module delivering 1280 Kpps forwarding performance and 2 Gbps of routing, firewall, NAT, and QoS services resulting in zero packet loss. The test illustrated the high performance services architecture of the HP MSR50 Series that allows multiple services to be implemented together on a single modular platform.
The above tests are just an illustration of the series of tests completed on the HP MSR50 and HP 6608 routers in the SPOC lab with the Spirent TestCenter and Spirent Avalanche equipment to emulate the most demanding enterprise WAN environments. To learn more about the tests, stop by the HP booth at Interop 2012 and HP Discover 2012 in Las Vegas, Nevada - June 4-7. HP will be conducting a live performance tests of the HP 6608 router with the Spirent TestCenter equipment at the shows.
HP router portfolio – high performance, integrated features and fast convergence
The router testing with Spirent solutions demonstrates the industry-leading performance of HP routers. Besides performance and scale, the HP MSR and HP 6600 routers enable rich integrated services and fast convergence for enterprise WAN networks. HP offers a comprehensive enterprise router portfolio that enables you to design a WAN network that helps meet your needs for emerging cloud services, rich media and enterprise applications.
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