CUSTOMER CASE STUDY

HP CAMPUS AND BRANCH ROUTERS DEMONSTRATE INDUSTRY LEADING SCALABILITY, SERVICES, AND RELIABILITY

HP ENTERPRISE BRANCH AND CAMPUS ROUTERS

The HP 6600 router series has a multi-core, distributed processing architecture that delivers high levels of
forwarding and security performance with carrier class reliability. HP MSR Series are high performance branch
routers that deliver WAN and LAN converged services in a single device. Using Spirent TestCenter, HP was able to
measure and demonstrate the performance and scale of the HP 6608 and HP MSR50 Series routers.

CHALLENGE TESTING HIGH-PERFORMANCE ROUTING AND SECURITY

The unprecedented load on today’s branch and campus
networks via the proliferation in cloud services, rich media,
and enterprise applications presents a challenge for network
designers. The problem is exacerbated for organizations adding
new branch offices to support a rapidly growing remote workforce.
Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C), which
includes offerings such as Telepresence, rich media, and web
conferencing, are wildly popular among enterprises. However,
these offerings require enterprise routers to deliver high-
throughput routing performance and support tens of thousands
of users connecting across a diverse set of tunneling technologies
such as IPsec, L2TP, and GRE. Real-time applications such as
voice and video also require resilient networks to be capable
of detecting and recovering from network and system failures
quickly without impacting guaranteed service level agreements
(SLAs) and end user experience.

To overcome these network challenges, enterprises need to deploy

industry leading performance and scale to deliver applications
across WAN/LAN networks for branch and campus users.

DELIVERING THE PLATFORM FOR THE NEXT
GENERATION OF ENTERPRISE CAMPUS WAN ROUTERS
HP responded with the HP 6600 Router Series, built on a multi-
core, distributed processing architecture that delivers up to 252
million packets per seconds (pps) forwarding performance with
comprehensive routing (MPLS), dynamic routing, IPv6, advanced
QoS, switching and security services (stateful firewall, NAT, IPsec
VPN) and flexible WAN/LAN connectivity options.
For large branch offices, the HP MSR50 Series routers deliver full-
featured routing, security, switching, wireless, and voice services
with superior forwarding up to 1280 Kpps.
But as with any solution, it had to be tested to make sure that it
was able to meet the performance, scale, and reliability required
for branch and campus WAN and LAN environments.
To stress a highly scalable platform such as the HP 6608 router
and HP MSR50 Series router, the test requirements would place
significant demands on a test system, which must support:
• Standards-based Layer 2-3 benchmarking test support
• A range of enterprise-class routing, tunneling, and security
features at high throughput and scale
• Ability to scale up to thousands of branch and campus users
and millions of aggregate connections, analyzing per stream
results in real time
HP turned to Spirent Communications to meet these requirements.
CUSTOMER CASE STUDY
HP ENTERPRISE BRANCH AND CAMPUS ROUTERS

The test bed consisted of a Spirent TestCenter chassis configured
with 6 HyperMetrics 12-port 1G modules, Spirent Avalanche 3100B
appliance and an HP 6608 router equipped with 4 FIP-210 line
cards. The test plan included the following test cases covering:
• Routing forwarding performance
• GRE tunneling scale
• Broadband session scale
• VRF instance scale
• Firewall TCP session setup rate, session scale, and throughput
• NAT session setup rate, session scale, and throughput
• IPsec VPN tunnel scale and throughput
• High availability convergence times
TESTING RESILIENCY AND CONVERGENCE TIMES
Using Spirent TestCenter, the resiliency of the HP 6608 router was
tested during two failure conditions:
• Fail-over of the main processing unit (MPU) of the HP 6608
router to illustrate system level resiliency. The primary MPU
was deactivated from the command line. The backup MPU
immediately assumed the active role with no impact detected on
the TestCenter related to end user experience or service quality.
• Multi-link failures between 8 groups of ports to emulate large
scale WAN failures occurring simultaneously. BFD was used
to quickly detect the link failures within milliseconds and IP
fast Re-Route (FRR) ensured that traffic was re-routed over the
redundant links instantly. The convergence time, post failure
was measured by Spirent TestCenter at 32.3 milliseconds
(323 packets lost at 10,000 PPS)

In addition, the HP MSR50 Series router delivered high speed

routing and services performance. During testing, the HP MSR50
Series router scaled to:
• 1280 Kpps forwarding
• 2 Gbps firewall
• 2 Gbps NAT
The results were unambiguous. The HP 6608 router delivered high • 2 Gbps QoS
performance and scalable routing and security services to satisfy
next generation requirements for campus WAN networks. Using Spirent TestCenter, HP routers demonstrated that they met
the performance, scale and resiliency requirements of the next
Spirent originated and terminated stateful traffic and validated generation of branch and campus WAN networks.
that the HP 6608 router delivered:
These tests translate to hundreds of users at hundreds of
• 110 million pps forwarding performance branches simultaneously accessing millions of application, cloud
• 60 Gbps firewall and NAT throughput and rich media sessions.
• 8 million TCP sessions per second Using Spirent TestCenter and Avalanche equipment, HP
• 340,000 sessions per second demonstrated that they met the performance, scale and
• 24 Gbps of IPsec VPN (AES) Throughput resiliency requirements to help enterprises design high
performance branch and campus networks to enable cloud
Spirent also established IPsec, L2TP, and GRE tunnels and PPPoE
applications, rich media, and enterprise applications for
sessions with the HP 6608 router and measured that HP 6608
enterprise users across the WAN.
scaled to:
L earn more about the products used in this test:
• 6,000 IPsec VPN tunnels
• 18,000 L2TP tunnels • Blog: HP raising the bar on router performance
• 20,000 GRE tunnels • Spirent TestCenter
• 36,000 PPPoE sessions • Spirent Avalanche
• HP 6600 Router Series
• HP MSR50 Series

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© 2012 Spirent Communications, Inc. All of the company names and/or brand names and/or product names referred to in this document,
in particular the name “Spirent” and its logo device, are either registered trademarks or trademarks pending registration in accordance
with relevant national laws. All rights reserved. Specifications subject to change without notice. Rev. A 06/12