"We have found that there is absolutely no issue with the switch," says Tom Nosella, senior manager of technical marketing at Cisco. "When you find something like this, you need a second tool to verify your results."
Brocade, trying to bolster its case that the Cisco switch has critical performance issues, shared its internal test results last week with Byte and Switch. It tested an MDS 9509 with version 1.1(1) firmware and configured with 16-port line cards. Using Spirent's SmartFabric test application, Brocade ran a 48-port, full-mesh test with 2,148-byte frames, testing for out-of-order delivery (OOD) and frame loss. It spread the 48 ports randomly across the seven blades in the 9509's chassis.
With in-order delivery (IOD) turned on and tested with a single crossbar, Brocade found that the MDS 9509 returned the following error rates:
Table 1: Brocade Test Results for Cisco MDS 9509, Single Crossbar With In-Order Delivery Turned On
| Test Load % | Total % Frames Dropped |
| 10.00000 | 0.01947 |
| 20.00000 | 0.02997 |
| 30.00000 | 0.03557 |
| 40.01474 | 0.04817 |
| 50.00000 | 0.06987 |
| 60.00000 | 0.03116 |
| 70.06452 | 0.07857 |
| 80.08850 | 0.02518 |
| 90.04975 | 0.03182 |
| 100.00000 | 0.13233 |
| Source: Brocade | |
Note that if a Fibre Channel switch drops any frames at all, it's cause for concern because the condition can impair performance.
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