"Cisco felt it could compete on price better with the option to use oversubscribed line cards with more ports," notes Nick Allen, analyst with Gartner Inc.
However, Cisco asserts that the 32-port card is nonblocking. "We're oversubscribed, which means you basically have multiple ports vying for a limited amount of bandwidth," Dul says. "Blocking means you have congestion in the network and you're not able to fulfill the utilization of the bandwidth."
The company points to testing it commissioned from Mier Communications Inc. (Miercom) in December 2002. That report said the 32-port card was nonblocking because the throughput was "evenly distributed across all port groups and there were no dropped frames." Using 2,148-byte frames generated by Spirent Communications's SmartBits 6000, Mier measured throughput of roughly 249 MByte/s for each four-port group. The test also checked the 32-port card's oversubscription ratio, putting it at 3.3 to 1.
What do enterprise users think of this whole issue? Barry Brazil, a SAN architect with consulting firm Brazil Hieber & Associates, says the 16- and 32-port modules actually do allow users to design more cost-effective SANs.
"The 32-port blade provides connectivity to initiators and targets that do not need the full pipe, but still uses the same backplane and all feature sets of the MDS," he says. "That is a win/win any way you look at it -- and it still beat the Brocade 12000 in performance."
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