Cisco: PCRF Performance Improved

 Murali Nemani (pictured), Sr. Director, Service Provider Mobility Marketing, Cisco updates in a blog post about a recent performance test for its (ex. BroadHop) Quantum policy manager.

The test, performed by EANTC (see "How did EANTC Test Comverse PCRF?" - here), shows the system has a "linear scale-out to 250K transactions-per-second with 75M concurrent sessions" (see report below).

Cisco UCS 5108

A "system" in this case was up to 6 UCS 5108 chassis, each taking 6RU with 8 UCS B200 blades, with fabric interconnect. For the table below I took the numbers for a single chassis with 6 blades ("initial load") in order to try to compare with the other vendors. Previous test results by BroadHop (here) "Demonstrated support for 28,000 TPS with 16 blades in a single 10U chassis"

See below a short comparison of all tests published so far. Test scenarios, hardware configuration, size and cost are not the same in all tests. Probably even the definitions of TPS (or PDP contexts setups by some vendors) are not equal as well. Please refer to vendor's documentation for more specific information.

Vendor	Date Published	Tester	System Performance (TPS/Chassis)	Subscribers/ System	Blade Performance	Blog Post
Cisco	Feb 22, 2013	EANTC	34,000	10.2M
Openet	Jan 9, 2013	Internal	200,000		25,000	Here
Comverse	Jan 9, 2013	EANTC	200,000	31.5M	15,000	Here
Tango Telecom	Feb 6, 2012	Internal	192,000		12,000	Here
Amdocs (Bridgewater)	Sep  15, 2010	EANTC				Here

See "A Quantum Leap Forward for Policy" - here.