For example, he says, using Spirent Communications' SmartBits 48-port full-mesh test, he's seen dropped frames in the ballpark of 0.04 to 0.05 percent on the MDS switches -- well above the error rates on Brocade switches, which he says are roughly one in a trillion. Brocade obtained the Cisco switches, which Totah says are running firmware release 1.1, from IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM).
These latest allegations come as competitors are also criticizing Cisco's 32-port line card as oversubscribed. Cisco, however, not only owns up to this, but says the 32-port card provides SAN designers more flexible options (see Cisco: Oversubscribed by Design).
But Cisco says there are simply no out-of-order or dropped frame issues with its switch, and that any interpretation that there are is the result of a misunderstanding of its architecture.
First, says Tom Nosella, senior manager of technical marketing in Cisco's Storage Technology Group, it is architecturally impossible for the MDS 9000 switches to put frames out of order within the switch itself. "We never load-balance dynamically across the crossbars -- it's a static mapping," he says.
The only way an MDS 9000 switch could be caused to transmit frames out of order is if there were a topology change introduced to the fabric, at which point, Nosella says, "anybody will have problems with dropped frames... drops are normal and they happen in topology changes on anybody's switch."
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