[January 29, 2014]

Cisco Nexus 9500 Switch Offers Highest Performance and Lowest Latency in Miercom 40GE Competitive Study

Miercom, a leading independent test lab, announced today it has verified in a comprehensive review that Cisco's (News - Alert) Application Centric Infrastructure switches Nexus 9508 and Nexus 9516 equipped with the 36-port 40GE ACI Spine line card delivered highest performance, lowest latency and lowest power consumption compared to competitive product offerings.

Key findings for the Cisco Nexus 9508 and Nexus 9516 include:

• Perform full line rate throughput with zero loss in full mesh 288 port x 40GE (Nexus 9508) and 576 port x 40GE (Nexus 9516) high density tests, and outperform all competitive switches Miercom has tested to date.
• Provide consistent low latency under heavy load regardless of frame size in a fully populated testing configuration, up to 65% percent lower latency than other similar switches.
• Exhibits low jitter/small latency variance regardless of frame size in fully populated switch tests.
• Cisco Nexus 9508 consumes 36 percent less power per 40 Gigabit Ethernet port for a fully populated 288 x 40GE port switch when compared to the most power efficient comparable switch.

Nexus 9500 switches form the foundation of Cisco's Application Centric Infrastructure, built specifically for the needs of enterprise and Service Provider cloud datacenters and designed to help those organizations achieve greater business agility. The Cisco Nexus 9500 Series Switches offer up to 16 line card slots with 576 line rate 40GE ports, providing the high-performance, low-latency, non-blocking spine layer for the ACI fabric infrastructure.

"Combining merchant silicon and custom ASICs, the Nexus 9500 portfolio includes system innovations such as the ndustry's first backplane-free modular switch, efficient power and cooling, and a simpler design to improve mean time between failures," said Thomas Scheibe, director, product management at Cisco. "The Nexus 9500 family, with optimized NX-OS, provides "zero-touch" operations across high performance data center networks."

The need to quickly process enormous amounts of complex data requires faster, more reliable network infrastructures. In a world where milliseconds of transaction delays have the potential to cost financial services organizations millions of dollars, the most successful firms need the highest performing IT systems in order to gain and maintain their competitive advantage.

"Applications such as high performance computing, high frequency trading, Big Data, and cloud computing place higher demands on network infrastructure," said Rob Smithers, CEO of Miercom. "For those networks, high port density, high throughput, low latency, low jitter, and high performance consistency are critical and must be rigorously tested. The Nexus 9500 family has raised the bar in the industry by scoring best overall in benchmark tests, and by demonstrating massive scalability. The Cisco Nexus 9516 proved in test not to drop a single packet at line rate with the largest scale 576 x 40GE review conducted in the industry."

Miercom has awarded the Cisco Nexus 9500 series its Performance Verified Certification. Based on thorough hands on testing Miercom found that the high 40GE port density, performance, reliability and consistency of both the Nexus 9508 and Nexus 9516 are well suited for data centers with the most demanding applications.

The Cisco Nexus 9500 series resets the bar by breaking multiple test records in the most comprehensive 40GE Data Center Switch Review.

The full results of the Miercom tests are available at www.miercom.com/cisco. Learn more about Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure and the Cisco Nexus 9000 series.

About Cisco

Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) is the worldwide leader in IT that helps companies seize the opportunities of tomorrow by proving that amazing things can happen when you connect the previously unconnected. For ongoing news, please go to http://thenetwork.cisco.com.

About Miercom

Miercom is a global leader in independent product testing, and has hundreds of comprehensive testing and product comparison analysis published over the years. Miercom certifications are used by networking industries and global businesses as an accurate, unbiased source of product assessment.

Miercom features comprehensive certification and test programs including Performance Verified, Certified Secure, Certified Green as well as other validation or conformance testing services. To access the latest Miercom test reviews and technology industry assessments please visit www.miercom.com.

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]