Our Baseline 2 combined Baseline 0 and Baseline 1 to guarantee that we were oversubscribing the intercore links while we sat back and watched the smoke. The MOS and PESQ for VOIP quality and the V-Factor for video quality are all measured on a scale of 1 to 5, with 4.5 being a realistic maximum or MOS and for PESQ and 4.9 being the mark for DVD-quality video. R-Factor measures voice quality on a 100 point scale, with 90 to 100 corresponding to MOS scores of 4.3 to 5. The goal was to measure a slice of a midsize corporation's general traffic flow. We wanted to confirm that each vendor really could protect the voice and video flows according to the standards provisions. As a side benefit, this also gave us a historical view because we've actually done variations on this test for the past 10 years.

What we found confirmed our theory that our baselines were reasonable, and for this particular scenario, nearly identical. In our voice tests, both vendors' gear scored a 4.5 for average PESQ and 93.2 for R-Factor. HP's V-Factor average was around 4.95; Extreme's was about 4.91.

The reality is that we had expected no appreciable variances between our test vendors during the baseline performance tests. This is because 10-Gig networking really has matured enough that large variances between switch products in the day-to-day performance department simply don't happen anymore. Even if Cisco had participated, we're confident that all the solutions would differentiate themselves only in the optional portion of our shootout.

SIDEBAR

Spirent melds voice, video, and data into networking test gear