Data Centers Featured Article

3Com Corp. and Spirent Communications have announced a live data center proof of concept demonstration that showcases the capabilities of 3Com’s (News - Alert) flagship H3C S12500 and S5820X data center switches under a host of “rigorous” next-generation data center scenarios.

The demonstration allows data center operators to visualize the design and performance capabilities of a next generation multi-terabit data center, according to company officials.

According to a press release, the SPoC demos are built around the 100 Gbps-ready H3C S12500 core switch and the H3C S5820X 10 GbE top-of-rack access switch. Company officials said that the demos showcase 3Com’s advantages in delivering twice the performance and scale.

Additionally, the SPoC demos also showcase faster recovery and up to 50 percent lower cost and energy usage verses competing legacy solutions.

“Our powerful H3C S12500 is raising the bar on data center networking, transforming the way next generation data centers are built and run,” said Saar Gillai, senior vice president for worldwide products and solutions at 3Com, in the release.

The H3C S12500 offers customers the option to leverage a simplified network design that reaches “unprecedented” levels of performance, scale and resiliency, said Gillai, adding that the company’s H3C data center solutions help customers accelerate the deployment of new services such as video streaming, virtualization and cloud computing.

The demonstration is expected to be showcased at the Spirent Proof of Concept (SPoC) Lab in Sunnyvale, California, through January 2010.

Additionally, visitors to the SPoC Lab are expected to also see H3C’s Intelligent Resilient Framework (IRF) technology demonstration. Unlike legacy technologies, IRF technology allows network operators to manage thousands of GbE and 10 GbE ports as single virtual IP address.

Moreover, with IRF technology, network-based In-Service-Software-Upgrades (ISSS) can ensure network and business continuity by extending the switch fabric control plane across multiple active switches. This provides a sub 50-millisecond recovery in the event of network disruption verses up to several seconds for traditional Spanning Tree Protocol (STP)-based network designs.

The Spirent TestCenter HyperMetrics test module also tests the performance, latency and resiliency of the H3C data center network design under various traffic and protocol conditions, including layer 2 and layer 3 switching, IPv4, IPv6, Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), and more.

Michel Lynge, marketing communications manager at Spirent, noted that the complexities of tomorrow’s data centers present critical performance, resiliency and security challenges that need to be validated across all data center infrastructure elements.

“Spirent’s holistic data center test architecture allows customers to benchmark this performance from network servers to storage systems, 10 GbE to 40/100 GbE, iSCI to FC to FCoE, layer 2 to layer 7, helping enterprises better design solutions that achieve their next generation data center vision,” Lynge said.