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Cell Relay Retreat>List Archive>month:1998-Sep> msg00320



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Re: Recommendations for oc3/oc12 adapters other than Fore

  • From: Jan Thomsen <janth@notes.rh.dk>
  • Date: Sat, 26 Sep 1998 13:12:52 +0200



Mark Thomasson wrote:

> Wondering what other vendors , other than Fore, offer Oc3/OC12 ATM adapters
> for the server environment and what experiences any of you may have had with
> them.
>
> I don't have anything against Fore.I just want get an idea of what else is
> out there
>
> Mark Thomasson

Mark,

when we chose OC-3 cards for some PC-based radiological viewing stations,
I mad a benchmark of Multimode Fibre cards from the following vendors:

Olicom
Fore
3COM

The bencmark showed the ForeRunner LE cards to be superior for our
purposes, communicating primarily with some Sun systems having SunAtm
adapters.

It achieved TCP throughputs of around 120 Mbps to the Sun Servers.
The 3COM cards were not bad either, but the Olicom cards did not perform
well with the Sun adapters (around 30 Mbps), while they were doing OK
when communicating with Fore and 3COM cards.

So we ended up using ForeRunner LE cards - something we have had no
reason to regret as yet.

On the Sun side we did not try anything else (I have no idea if there are any
options)
but we saw TCP throughputs with other Sun hosts with TCP throughputs of
around 129 Mbps (CPU utilizations around 50-60%).  The throughputs to the
ForeRunners were around 120 Mbps on WinNT 4.0.

The 129 Mbps is close to the theoretical limit for TCP on OC-3 - I think I
calculated it
to be around 99% of the theoretical limit.
We are using Cisco LightStream 1010 switches.

Regards,
Jan Thomsen
Project Manager