China Mobile, China’s largest mobile operator, has selected Spirent Communications to evaluate the performance of high-density Fibre Channel Director Switches in its evaluation lab. Spirent’s Fibre Channel tool helps China Mobile ensure the scalability, performance, and reliability of storage area networks (SAN) demanded by modern data centers, says a spokesperson.
Spirent will help the Chinese mobile operator evaluate multiple leading vendors’ switches with 128 ports of 8 Gigabit Fibre Channel. Following the initial round of testing, China Mobile plans to standardize on Spirent for subsequent Fibre Channel switch testing.
“With rich and new applications pushing the need for greater and faster storage, we realize it is vital to test performance of Fibre Channel switches, and are pleased to leverage Spirent’s leadership and expertise in Fibre Channel testing in our vendor evaluation process,” says Mr. Lijun Zhao, Director of Testing Technology Research Institute, China Mobile Research Institute.
Spirent’s data center solution delivers the industry’s first layer 2-7 converged performance benchmarking test system, including Spirent TestCenter 2/4/8 Gigabit HyperMetrics Fibre Channel test module and the Spirent TestCenter HyperMetrics 10 Gigabit Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) test module. Together, they are said to reduce the total cost of ownership by eliminating the complexity of multiple systems.
Spirent “is now driving a new set of benchmarking methodologies to meet the requirements of a new generation of converged cloud data center networks,” says Gene Zhang, vice president, Asia Pacific at Spirent. “We are pleased to work with China Mobile in jointly defining next generation Fibre channel benchmarking methodologies that will enable data center operators to evaluate the best solution for their networks.”