ENGINEERING

Independent testing by The Tolly Group shows the significant advantage Force10 offers over Cisco and Juniper for data centers looking to earn an Energy Star rating or implementing energy-efficiency measures to lower power and cooling costs

Force10 Networks has announced that its ExaScale E-Series chassis-based core switch/router consumed significantly less power than comparable Cisco and Juniper switches based on independent tests conducted by The Tolly Group and compared to vendor-published data. This demonstrated power savings advantage in both Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and 10 GbE line-rate switching configurations enables data centers to lower energy consumption and related costs, and can contribute toward earning the recently announced data center Energy Star rating.

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Whether a data center is seeking the Energy Star label or establishing energy management programs to lower recurring power and cooling costs, the energy-efficient architecture of the Force10 ExaScale core switch/router offers a significant advantage over the leading competitors’ products. As demonstrated by independent testing from The Tolly Group, the ExaScale consumes less than half the power of the Cisco Nexus 7000 and 23% less power than Juniper in line-rate GbE and 10 GbE configurations, a switching requirement that is common in most data center networks.   

“Data center power and cooling costs are forecasted to rise significantly in the next several years. Ironically, positive device attributes, such as performance and port density, are driving these higher costs. Consequently, we anticipate data center managers will more closely examine how switches are architected to minimize energy consumption,” said Kevin Tolly, founder, The Tolly Group. “Our testing indicated that Force10 clearly recognizes this ongoing concern and has demonstrated a critically important capability to combine robust performance features with very low power consumption.” 

Tolly engineers measured power consumption of the Force10 ExaScale in a fully loaded line-rate GbE and 10 GbE configurations in Watts (W) per Gbps of throughput. Engineers then used energy consumption data based on figures published by Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks to calculate energy requirements for their comparable data center core switches.  

Configured with the maximum possible 1,260 GbE ports, the Force10 ExaScale E1200i model used only 4.77W per Gbps of throughput compared to calculations of 9.28W for the Cisco Nexus 7000 Series, and 6.15W for a Juniper EX8216, both configured with the maximum possible of 768 GbE ports. Configured with the maximum possible 140 line-rate 10 GbE ports, the ExaScale draws only 3.34W per Gbps of throughput compared to calculations of 7.59W for the Nexus 7000, and 4.69W for the Juniper EX8216, both configured with the maximum of 128 line-rate 10 GbE ports. The primary test tool for traffic generation was Ixia’s XM12 chassis, with IxAutomate 6.90 GA and IxExplorer used for data collection and analysis.

“Force10 needed us to participate to ensure we tested their high performance core switch/router under full load,” said Jim Smith, vice president of marketing for Ixia. “One of the challenges of benchmarking power consumption is ensuring you are truly testing the performance limits of the device by establishing that the system is processing packets at full capacity.  To that end, Ixia’s testing solutions were an excellent tool to ensure that Force10’s ExaScale E-Series was stressed to its performance limits for the testing.”

ExaScale E-Series: Blending High Performance with Energy Efficiency
The ExaScale E-Series family represents the third generation of Force10 switch/routers designed to meet the stringent performance, management and cost requirements of today’s virtualized data center and cloud computing environments. ExaScale supports mission-critical applications across converged fabrics in data center, telecommunication provider, service provider, enterprise and HPCC networks.

With support for the industry’s leading 10 GbE and GbE densities for a half-rack chassis, the 40/100 GbE-ready Force10 ExaScale E-Series is designed to deliver the performance, availability, resiliency and flexibility essential to power these new dynamic environments while significantly lowering total operating and management costs.

Force10 Joins Climate Savers Computing Initiative
To further demonstrate its leadership in energy-efficient networking, Force10 has joined the Climate Savers Computing Initiative (CSCI). Since its formation in 2007, CSCI has grown to some 645 members, including large commercial enterprises and technology industry stakeholders, who are focused on reducing the energy consumption of computers, servers and storage devices as part of its original charter. Following the release of CSCI’s July, 2010 report that showed that the IT sector has reduced annual CO2 emissions associated with IT equipment by more than 32 million metric tons worldwide since 2007, the industry coalition added the networking sector to its mission after seeing how reducing energy consumption of these network devices could significantly advance their mission.

“More than ever, power consumption is now a major consideration as evidenced by how it has fundamentally impacted the physical design of data centers,” said Steve Garrison, vice president of marketing, Force10 Networks. “Energy efficiency has long been an architectural tenet of Force10 and will grow in importance with attributes, such as predictable application performance, as more and more data centers feel the pain of exploding power and cooling costs.”