New price/performance leader for Ethernet switches?

[chris mccraw]

On Tue, Sep 19, 2000 at 10:27:13PM -0400, Greg Lindahl wrote:
> For a long time, the HP Procurve 4000M was the price/performance leader for
> fast ethernet switches. One of my co-workers (John Eshleman) points out a
> new contender:
> 
> http://intel.com/network/products/exp420t.htm
> 
> The 420T has 48 ports and 2 slots which take gigabit expansion cards. It is
> apparently always store-and-forward, but claims 20 usec switching latencies
> for 100 mbit. Street price (www.hardwarestreet.com) is $1540, the gbit
> uplinks are $377.

i think someone should actually test the 420T before anyone gets their
hopes up...the previous generation, 410T 24port switches performed
horribly when taxed at all.  streaming at full speed over >8 ports
(that is, 4 senders and 4 receivers) even with largest-possible-legal packets
brought the performance on all ports down to half, and degraded further
as more ports were taxed.  we were donated some (thank you, intel!) but
had to replace them with ciscos as our apps were actually hitting a network
bottleneck far before their time.
they are decent switches for people who don't need all the bandwidth at
once...but that's what i buy hubs for.

fortunately the intel etherexpress pro/100 cards we were also donated
are still champs in the 100mbit range.