Medusa Labs Verifies Performance Of Vixel 9200 2gb/S Switch

EDP Weekly's IT Monitor, Jan 7, 2002

Vixel Corporation (Nasdaq:VIXL), a provider of storage area networking (SAN) solutions, announced recently that a recent test by Medusa Labs has confirmed the high performance levels achieved by the 9200 2Gb/s Fabric switch in Vixel's own Solutions and Interoperability Lab. The independent lab used commercially available 2Gb/s storage networking products as well as its own proprietary testing tools to achieve a combination of real world application performance measurements as well as a Full Duplex performance stress test.

"We were extremely pleased, although not surprised, by the performance levels our 2Gb/s switch achieved in the independently conducted Medusa Labs test," says Claude Lorenson, director of product marketing at Vixel Corporation. "For Vixel, these tests serve as independent confirmation of what we already knew -- that the 9000 Series is a great product line that lives up to its pedigree and design goals. As other companies introduced their 2Gb/s products, we performed our own comparative benchmark testing as well. We continue to be very confident telling end users and OEMs alike that our switch leads the pack in raw I/O performance adherent to accepted industry standards."

The Medusa performance analysis testing was conducted using 2Gb/s HBAs and four 2Gb/s JBODs. Full Duplex performance was gauged by reading from 2 JBODs and writing to 2 JBODs simultaneously. The system used in the configuration was the broadly used Dell PowerEdge 2500 (2 x 1.13 Ghz processor, 512 MB RAM), which Medusa determined would meet its needs for the extreme I/O generation necessary to properly analyze/stress the 9200 switch. In addition to the Dell system and Medusa's own I/O generating tools, Medusa used its "SANMetrics," a comprehensive Fibre Channel trace post-processing utility that is capable of identifying performance characteristics of a Fibre Channel configuration. SANMetrics was used during the test to regularly verify that findings were accurate at both the application and Fibre Channel levels.

In sequential Reads ranging from 16k bytes (with 12,502 IOPS) to 512k bytes (with 394.5 IOPS) the Vixel 9200 achieved performance levels of 195.34 MB/s and 197.25 MB/s respectively. Sequential Write rates were similarly high with 184.5 MB/s achieved at a 512k byte block with 369 IOPS. The Medusa Labs report also commented that, "Although we did not test over distance, the 32 credits (per port) standard on the Vixel switch should give it performance advantages over long distances," and that "Full Duplex performance exhibited good numbers in small to large I/O."

A full copy of the Medusa Labs independent test report on the Vixel 9200 is available on the company's web site at www.vixel.com in the switch products section.

Vixel's 2Gb/s 9000 Series switches offer the highest data-throughput rates with full duplex speeds of up to 400 MB/s at each port. The 9000 Series switches support up to 32 switches and 7 hops in multi-layer environments, offering the increased scalability needed for attaining new density levels in large switch meshes. Leveraging the inherent advantages of the architecture of its 7000 Series switches, Vixel's new line of 2Gb/s fabric switches are ideal for large switch meshes, cascading switch environments and joining islands of SANs.