ProCurve, a sector of HP, announced that its new ProCurveصs 8212zl Core Switch has successfully passed a series of very demanding performance tests provided by advanced Ixia. In all tests, the new switch matched or exceeded ProCurveصs own published specifications.

ProCurve said commissioned tests were designed according to specific criteria. Within the scope of these tests Broadband Testing sought to prove that the ProCurve Switch 8212zl is capable of supporting high levels of data and real-time traffic across a 10-Gigabit Ethernet (or multiples thereof) network core. The product was placed into a million-dollar test-bed provided by Ixia (www.ixiacom.com), which was capable of generating very high levels of general (HTTP, FTP etc) traffic, as well as real-time application delivery such as VoIP and Video-on-Demand.

The test-bed emulated an enterprise topology using the OSPF routing protocol to fully stress the 8212zl. In addition, live Video, Voice over IP and HTTP/FTP applications were also emulated over the advertised OSPF routes by Ixia test ports to measure the end userصs experience on overall service quality. Taking, as the starting point, ProCurve published figures, it was found that the switchصs performance equaled or beat every single one of them within the tests. The tests achieved line rate performance with zero packet loss. The switch was able to deliver high-resolution video and VoIP (300 streams and 240 calls per second respectively) successfully over an already heavily loaded network (in excess of 7Gbps of HTTP/FTP traffic per port).

Additionally, the testing found that the new Core switch has a broad spectrum of traffic and network management functionality, security options and a wireless edge option, so is a very comprehensive product in its own right beyond the basic core backbone requirements.

The switch is very competitively priced and comes with a genuine lifetime warranty - unique in this market - meaning both low entry price and very low cost of ownership figures.