To handle this eventuality, Brocade, Cisco, and McData switches all include a feature -- called in-order delivery -- that basically freezes the SAN fabric and flushes out the frames that are still in the switch. That eliminates the chance that a frame will end up in the wrong order on an egress port.
Now, according to Nosella, the only difference between Cisco's approach to this issue and its competitors is that Cisco turns off the feature by default, whereas in Brocade and McData fabrics it is typically enabled.
"Because our switch forwards everything in order, [in-order delivery] is off by default," Nosella says. "If a customer is running a very structured SAN design, the chance of having an out-of-order frame is slim to none." In a fully meshed network, he adds, it's advisable to turn on in-order delivery "for safety reasons," in case one of the links in the network goes down.
Thus, according to Cisco, someone would conclude that its switch has a higher out-of-order frame error rate than its competitors only if he or she didn't know -- or deliberately ignored -- that the switch's in-order delivery feature is turned off by default.
Nosella says Miercom, a testing firm in Princeton Junction, N.J., ran the Cisco switch through an exhaustive battery of tests in December 2002, and that it turned up none of the problems that Brocade or the Merrill Lynch note allude to. Brocade's Totah says he's not "not sure why Miercom didn't see" any of the performance problems Brocade has.
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