[Beowulf] Re: switching capacity terminology confusion

[Rahul Nabar]

On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 9:47 AM, Mark Hahn <hahn at mcmaster.ca> wrote:
>> the best answer I get is "Cisco is the market leader in switches".
>> They won't show me which of their parameters make a Cisco switch
>> better than the rest.
>
> well, one parameter is "market share".  another is "brand".
> cisco owners will also often advocate benchmarking based on the
> "comfort-level" parameter, but IMO this result overlaps two others.
>
> it's remarkably hard to find comparisons on old-fashioned, boring
> metrics like latency, backplane bandwidth/pps or mtbf.
>

It is! Nobody will tell me those. And each switch manufacturer seems
to use different metrics making apples-for-apples comparisons hard. I
have the feeling that buying the backbone is going to be the most
in-exact part of the venture.

Greg previously mentioned looking at 3rd party lab reports. But I
haven't found anything useful+ current yet. Any pointers? Lots of
home-hardware lab reports but nothing on the HPC / enterprise
switching side.

-- 
Rahul