3Com Corporation Conducts Landmark Performance Test of ATM and LAN Emulation for Large Scale Networks; "Mother Of All Tests" or "MOAT", Demonstrates Powerful Scalability, Bandwidth and Robustness in Largest Ethernet-To-ATM Network Ever Tested.

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 15, 1996--Before an audience of customers and industry influencers, 3Com Corporation (NASDAQ:COMS) tested the largest public Ethernet-to-ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) network in networking history.

This landmark test, held in 3Com's Santa Clara ATM Test Lab, demonstrated how LAN Emulation (LANE) -- a year-old industry standard technology for Ethernet-to-ATM networks -- provides the scalability and manageability to create very high performance, very large scale corporate networks.

LANE technology enables businesses to cost-effectively scale the performance of 10 Mbps (megabit per second) Ethernet networks -- the world's most popular local area networking technology -- to ATM technology's 155 Mbps-plus performance. Businesses need this level of performance scalability to handle new applications such as video, multimedia, and Intranetworking.

"We felt that a public test of this magnitude would do a service to the entire industry and stimulate new productive dialogue among vendors, the professional testing and analyst communities," said Nachman Shelef, vice president and general manager at 3Com Corporation. "While 3Com has had experience deploying LANE at large customer sites for more than a year, today we are providing the industry with a level of detail that is difficlle, director of ENL labs, and Netcom Systems, and use d by many independent testing organizations. 3Com created a 800 node switched/6,400 node shared network, with each node connected via one of 70 SuperStack II Switch 2700 or LANplex 2500 Ethernet-to-ATM switches. These switches -- deployed at the edge or boundary of the network -- were connected to the ATM backbone via OC-3 155 Mbps ATM downlinks. The backbone -- or core -- of the network consisted of 17 CELLplex 7000 ATM backbone high function switches, each with the capacity for 16 OC-3 ATM ports. The test bed also featured 40 Netcom SmartBits Systems, with 20 full-rate Ethernet ports per chassis for a total of 800 test ports.

"The massive scale of the MOAT event is a startling measure of the progress accomplished by switching technology. It should change the way we think about building local area networks," said Bob Mandeville, director of European Networking Labs. "The AST (Advanced Switch Test) test suite running on the MOAT platform was designed back in 1993 to fully exercise LAN switching fabrics. It got a lot of attention at that time because it ran on a record number of six switched ports. Had anyone suggested that in less than three years the X-Stream stress test would be fully loading an 800 switched-port test platform, I would not have taken them seriously."

Three Test Scenarios

MOAT consisted of three hypothetical yet realistic scenarios designed to push the network to its limits:

Test One: "800-port Ethernet-to-ATM." Under the guidelines of AST, the 800 SmartBits Ethernet ports exchanged full-rate Ethernet traffic to the group of 17 CELLplex ATM switches, with the 70 SuperStack II Switch 2700s providing LAN Emulation between the Ethernet and ATM devices.

Methodology: In this test, multiple streams of Ethernet traffic were generated with all of the ports on the Ethernet-to-ATM edge device both sending and receiving frames at the same time. This was termed the Backbone Test.

Results: With 400 ports active, no frames were lost. With 800 ports active, frames loss was less than 0.01 percent.

Test Two: "2.5 Gbps-To-One Switch." This test featured the CELLplex switch with a fully saturated backplane. A series of 64 Switch 2700 edge switches generating 400 ports and linked in groups of eight to Ethernet ports on CELLplex switches. This first layer of the CELLplex switches fed traffic via ATM downlinks to a second layer of four CELLplex ATM switches, which in turn concentrated all test traffic into a single CELLplex chassis, populated with 16 OC-3 155 Mbps ATM ports.

Methodology: Again, multiple streams of Ethernet traffic were generated with all of the ports on the Ethernet-to-ATM edge device both sending and receiving frames at the same time -- the Backbone Test. This was meant to overload the ATM backplane and pro vide a means of measuring an ATM backbone switch under severe strain.

Results: At full load on all 400 ports, 99.7 percent of all frames were passed -- within the expected range. The maximum number of Ethernet ports to one CELLplex 7000 with no frame loss is 384, displaying the scalability of LAN Emulation in large-scale networks.

Test Three: "Eight O'clock Phenomenon." This test was designed to examine how effectively ATM and LAN Emulation minimizes the wait for users seeking to be productive at the start of the workday, when the majority of the company is logging into the network. Using point-to-point traffic on the SmartBits Systems, the test measured how quickly data can be established on a large number of LAN Emulation-based Ethernet-to-ATM connections, all transmitting at the same time.

Methodology: Again, the Backbone Test was run with 800 available Ethernet ports feeding to a group of CELLplex high function switches, with Ethernet traffic generated by the Netcom SmartBits Systems. A network analyzer recorded the time for all data connections to be established, and the elapsed time between the start of communications and the moment that data stopped forwarding to a non-participating Ethernet port.

Results: Data direct connections for 400 ports were established in 102 seconds. Data direct connections for 800 ports were established in 117 seconds.

3Com Corporation has helped more than 36 million people gain access to critical information through high speed networks. Designed to serve large enterprises, small offices and homes, 3Com products provide a scaleable architecture to meet the immediate and long term connectivity needs of today's user. With research and development on three continents, 3Com is one of the data networking industry's largest and fastest growing companies. The company's innovative marketing, sales and support simplify communication, optimize network reliability and protect customer investments. For further information, visit 3Com's WorldWide Web site at http://www.3Com.com.

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Note to Editors: 3Com, LANplex and Transcend are registered trademarks, and CELLplex and SuperStack are trademarks of 3Com Corporation. All brands and names are property of their respective owners.

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