semi-affordable 10gb switch?

T

tacos4me

Gawd
Joined
Apr 5, 2006
Messages
815
i'm in the process of moving away from softlayer, and into a locally owned/operated datacenter with my own gear. have ordered most of the stuff, but am left wondering what to do about the network.

negotiated a 10gb handoff for a ridiculously reasonable price, via fiber or ethernet. i have two machines (currently), only one of em needs the 10gb (have a card for it already). i'm sitting at about $7k right now, so i'd like to keep costs down as much as possible.

what's the cheapest, most reliable switch y'all would recommend in such a scenario?
 
plupien79 said:
Netgear 8-port ProSAFE Plus XS708E

Only thing I see close to affordable
Click to expand...

yeah, i noticed those. not a bad price.. does anyone have any of these? any input on reliability? machines only see ~50mbit/s most of the time, periods of 2-3gb/s.

EDIT: also, what about dell 6200 series? specifically, the 6224. do those SFP uplinks work properly for host access?
 
Last edited:
tacos4me said:
yeah, i noticed those. not a bad price.. does anyone have any of these? any input on reliability? machines only see ~50mbit/s most of the time, periods of 2-3gb/s.
Click to expand...

Do you really need 10Gb ethernet then? Why not 1Gb with LACP or some other form of load balancing? There are many ways to get more bandwidth than 1Gbps than going 10Gb.

LACP
Adaptive Load Balancing
SMB 3.0 Multipathing
iSCSI Multipath I/O
Multipath TCP

There's also Infiniband
 
MysticRyuujin said:
Do you really need 10Gb ethernet then? Why not 1Gb with LACP or some other form of load balancing? There are many ways to get more bandwidth than 1Gbps than going 10Gb.

LACP
Adaptive Load Balancing
SMB 3.0 Multipathing
iSCSI Multipath I/O
Multipath TCP

There's also Infiniband
Click to expand...

i'm rolling with etherchannel currently. leaving softlayer though, and the equipment in this isp's 'datacenter' is not geared for colo at all. they can hand-off 1gb/10gb and addresses. that's about it. they'd also be charging me for more than one port..

instead of falling back on amazon for ridiculous prices (compared to what i will be paying now, damn) i'd rather just have the capacity to grow and not worry about it for awhile. i'm running origin/transcoding for video services, and it's growing all the time. talking 2-3gb/s for three hours during an event, couple times a month.
 
I don't have anything to add, but i'm in the exact same situation, so subbed.

If you need to rack anything in the Bangor area, let me know.
 
So why not buy a decent 1Gb switch with a 10Gb uplink? If they can "hand off" 10Gbps then you only need a single 10Gbps uplink...there's dozens (hundreds?) of those...
 
wizdum said:
I don't have anything to add, but i'm in the exact same situation, so subbed.

If you need to rack anything in the Bangor area, let me know.
Click to expand...

will keep in mind. may be moving into the area soon. thanks!

MysticRyuujin said:
So why not buy a decent 1Gb switch with a 10Gb uplink? If they can "hand off" 10Gbps then you only need a single 10Gbps uplink...there's dozens (hundreds?) of those...
Click to expand...

that's kinda what i'd like to do. sorry if there's miscommunication going on here. i was looking at the dell 6224, apparently the 'uplinks' can be used for hosts as well. this is all i would like to do. 10gb uplink via fiber, main esx machine that does all the video gets 10gb copper, and everything else 1gb. i have absolutely no need for even 8 10GbE ports. if i'm an idiot and this is a terrible way to go about this, please correct me, hah.
 
Zyxel's XGS1910-24 series might be an option?
Retails at ~300-400EUR in Germany
//Danne
 
gonna get the netgear XS708E and see how it goes i've decided. by the time i get sfp modules for anything else i'll already be exceeding the $750 i can grab this thing for.
 
tacos4me said:
gonna get the netgear XS708E and see how it goes i've decided. by the time i get sfp modules for anything else i'll already be exceeding the $750 i can grab this thing for.
Click to expand...

I have it, management tools isn't very good, but performance is good plus it's quiet.

With Intel X540, I can easily hit 900MB/s sequential transfer between ESXi and OmniOS. CIFS is about 500MB/s.
 
dilidolo said:
I have it, management tools isn't very good, but performance is good plus it's quiet.

With Intel X540, I can easily hit 900MB/s sequential transfer between ESXi and OmniOS. CIFS is about 500MB/s.
Click to expand...

that's what i have for an adapter as well. good to know, thanks. all the newegg reviews said it was really loud, but i guess that's relative to where/what you're used to working with.
 
tacos4me said:
that's what i have for an adapter as well. good to know, thanks. all the newegg reviews said it was really loud, but i guess that's relative to where/what you're used to working with.
Click to expand...

The 12 port model is loud, this one is very quiet, but the 12 port model does L3 while this one is L2 only.
 
I have a two Netgear XS712T (12 port version) switches w/ one of the ports used to bridge the two together, mainly for redundancy. As others have mentioned, yes it's loud, and it pushes some serious air, but it's in my data center so who cares about noise.

Connected to a three virtual host cluster w/ 10GbE nics hosting 60+ virtual machines and a SAN.

Performance has been excellent.

As dilidolo mentioned, management isn't the best and it's all done through webui, but if all you're doing is l2 traffic with VLANs, you can't beat the price/performance. Just get $40 10gig SFPs off eBay and you won't break the bank.

I also have a pair of Cisco SG500X's in my DR site for back-end SAN to virtual hosts. They're OK, but these Netgear switches are a better deal.
 
Last edited:
Something to keep in mind is these home/SMB 10Gb switches have tiny buffers, ~9MB dynamically allocated for the whole XS712T switch, that may have performance bottlenecks when the backplane is fully utilized and/or with iSCSI traffic. It's not until you go up to the Dell (Forc10) S60 that you get 1.25GB buffer or HP 5920 with 3.6GB buffer but their cost is relatively high at about $10K and $12K respectively but probably a better fit for critical production environment with storage traffic.
 
still haven't bought anything yet, hah. looking into cisco 3750 series now, specifically C3750G-16TD with the 10Gb module. thinking more about lacp route. have read the 10g port is 25% oversubscribed, which isn't a huge deal in my case.

anyone have input on 3750 series? thanks
 
I think people should be aware there is a new 10GbE switch for the SMB market. I'm trying to get one, but being a SMB product, my Cisco partner has a bit more difficulty to get a final price quote on it.

The Cisco SG500XG-8F8T is a 8x10Gb (Base-T) and 8x10Gb (SFP+) and 1x1Gbps for management switch. It has 16Mb of cache, seems to be relatively quiet... 30°C=41.7dB, 40°C=55.3dB with 4 fans that have speed controls and turning out only 342 BTU/hr.

The 8x 10Gb Base-T and the 8x 10Gb SFP+ is a very interesting combo. I see myself adding three hosts with Dual 10Gb Base-T, then using a SFP+ port to create a 5Gb trunk to my current Cisco SG500-28. Should I want to add more 10Gb links, I can still use 2x BaseT or 7 SFP+ sockets.

The SG500XG-8F8T seems to be priced above the XS712T, but I think it's a very interesting switch, but it depends how much your Cisco Partner can give you a discount.

Cisco Small Business 500 Series data sheets
www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/coll...e-managed-switches/c78-695646_data_sheet.html

Erik
 
The SG500XG-8F8T is part of the Cisco SBS market, normal Cisco partner NFR don't cover the SBS products :-(
 
couldn't bring myself to pull the trigger on the netgear. ended up getting a good deal on a 3750X and accompanying 10g module (C3KX-NM-10G). etherchannel is working out fine for my application so far.
 
There is some bad news about the SG500XG-8F8T. Its financial. The switch is not part of the normal Cisco Global Price List, but of the Small Business S<omething>. Therefore the normal margins do not apply. SBS margins are MUCH lower, so you will not get the normal NFR discounts. The switch will be in the $2800-$3200 range. Not $1650 ... :-(
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top