I've got a little quiz for you. I've asked this question 30 times over the last week and received an interesting set of answers. One set of numbers represent "real world" numbers, the other is a set of "marketing" numbers.
Here's the deal:
Take an appliance of your choice (let's say a security appliance like an IPS) that has 10 x 1Gb/s Ethernet interfaces.
Connect five of those interfaces interfaces to the test rig that generates traffic and connect the remaining five interfaces to the receiver.
Let's say that you send 5 Gb/s from the sender (Avalanche in the example above) across interfaces 1-5.
The traffic passes from the MAC's up the stack and through the appliance under test and then out through interfaces 6-10 where the traffic is received by the receiver (Reflector in the example above.)
So you've got 5Gb/s of traffic into the DUT and 5Gb/s of traffic out of the DUT with zero% loss.
You're question is as follows:
Using whatever math you desire (Cisco or otherwise,) what is the throughput of the traffic going through the DUT?
I ask this question because of the recent sets of claims by certain vendors over the last few weeks. Let's not get into stacking/manipulating the test traffic patterns -- I don't want to cloud the issue.
{Ed: Let me give you some guidance on the two most widely applicable answers to this question that I have received thus far. 85% of those surveyed said that the answer was 5Gb/s while a smaller minority asserts that it's 10Gb/s) It comes down to how one measures "aggregate" throughput. Please read comments below regarding measurement specifics.
So, what's your answer? Please feel free to 'splain your logic. I will comment with my response once comments show up so as not to color the results.
/Hoff
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