Why 802.11ax Is the Next Big Thing in Wi-Fi

[Zarathustra[H]]

The biggest problem with 10G for home or small business use is still the price of switches. This is why my 10G use is limited to a single direct link between my workstation and my NAS server on a subnet separate from my main network. Everything else is switched over my traditional gigabit switch.

10Gig switches are slowly creeping down in price, but it is taking MUCH MUCH longer than the transition from 100Mbit to Gigabit did, presumably because joe consumer doesn't care about wired Ethernet anymore. They just see wires as an ugly nuisance they'd rather not deal with, not understanding the limitations of WiFi.

ps. Zarathustra[H] good call on used 10GbE for back to back - some used IB gear falls into those price ranges too. For folks running Linux NAS, Services on the NAS + Windows iSCSI over IB to the desktop is pretty amazing

Well, what do you know.

I just got an email yesterday from Fiberstore.com (which has now apparently rebranded itself FS.com) where I bought my trasducers for the brocade adapters I used to use.

They apparently now have a line of unbranded switches, which have some highly attractive prices.

Layer2 Managed with seemingly all the bells and whistles.

24 Gig-E copper ports + 4 SFP+ 10 Gig "uplink" ports: $400
48 Gig-E copper ports + 4 SFP+ 10 Gig "uplink" ports: $480

They aren't 100% 10gig, but if you - like me - have a small number of boxes you want on 10gig (3 workstations and a server) and everything else is fine at gigabit, I haven't seen anything at this price before.

Only problem for me is that they are SFP+, and I have had bad experiences with fiber in the past, so I am not really interested in doing that again. Just on the off chance that they had models not displayed on their site, I shot them an email and asked if they had the 24 and 48 port models above, but with 10GBase-T copper ports instead of SFP+. They emailed back and said they could supply them, but also asked what my demand was and when I need delivery.

I'm suspecting that this means they are custom builds, which means much higher costs, unless you buy LOTS of them. Anyone interested in a group buy?

I also have no idea if they are any good, and I wonder if these Chinese designed products might "call home" or spy on us westerners, but...

Here is the link for the record

 

[Living Weapon]

Only problem for me is that they are SFP+, and I have had bad experiences with fiber in the past, so I am not really interested in doing that again. Just on the off chance that they had models not displayed on their site, I shot them an email and asked if they had the 24 and 48 port models above, but with 10GBase-T copper ports instead of SFP+. They emailed back and said they could supply them, but also asked what my demand was and when I need delivery.

I'm suspecting that this means they are custom builds, which means much higher costs, unless you buy LOTS of them. Anyone interested in a group buy?

I also have no idea if they are any good, and I wonder if these Chinese designed products might "call home" or spy on us westerners, but...

$100 per port + some free 1gig ports. I'll pass, but that's a great price. I'd definitely ask about compatibility for transceivers though - that's definitely an area that can be a pain. Specifically, if SFP+ DAC / SFP+ cable style are supported, which brands [those tend to be even less expensive than RJ45 style, and available locally].

As for "phone home", your firewall is just as adept at securing outbound as inbound, though maintaining that can be a PITA

 

[CacaSapo]

Bonding is trickier and not as effective as it at first seems.

I've been playing with 802.3ad link aggregation for years now, and while I ahve found places in which it works well (server workloads with many simultaneous connections that can be distributed across the connections) in most client workloads it is simply no better than having a single link.

10G can be expensive, but if you search around for used server pulls on eBay you can get into it much cheaper.

I had nothing but trouble with my 10G brocade fiber adapters, but now I have a matched pair of Intel copper 10gbaseT adapters and they work very very well.

The biggest problem with 10G for home or small business use is still the price of switches. This is why my 10G use is limited to a single direct link between my workstation and my NAS server on a subnet separate from my main network. Everything else is switched over my traditional gigabit switch.

10Gig switches are slowly creeping down in price, but it is taking MUCH MUCH longer than the transition from 100Mbit to Gigabit did, presumably because joe consumer doesn't care about woired Ethernet anymore. They just see wires as an ugly nuisance they'd rather not deal with, not understanding the limitations of WiFi.

The uneducated average consumer is always the death of everything I enjoy.

The plan is to get an ad switch and bond the two gig links to go with a bonded pair on the NAS. The assumption being that the bonded connection behaved as a single pipe.

GigE did seem to take off pretty quick and I concur with the "wires are ugly" thing being shortsighted.
A combination of wired/wireless is what I like, with wireless for toys and wired for throughput and reliability.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

The plan is to get an ad switch and bond the two gig links to go with a bonded pair on the NAS. The assumption being that the bonded connection behaved as a single pipe.

Unfortunately that's not the case.

Any given connection maxes out at the max speed of one of the links. If you have many simultaneous connections you can take advantage of both links though.

The latest versions of Microsofts SMB/CIFS protocol and NFS both claim to split traffic between multiple connections to use more bandwidth for single file transfers, but in practice I have never gotten it to work.

 

[CacaSapo]

Unfortunately that's not the case.

Any given connection maxes out at the max speed of one of the links. If you have many simultaneous connections you can take advantage of both links though.

The latest versions of Microsofts SMB/CIFS protocol and NFS both claim to split traffic between multiple connections to use more bandwidth for single file transfers, but in practice I have never gotten it to work.

Drat. Hopefully something reliable is in place before I make the move, or I'll just wait on 10Gbe. It's nothing mission-critical, so it can wait. Thanks for the first-hand info on this. Appreciate it.