10GE switches for the home, when?

bledd

bledd

bledd

Don
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Gigabit is getting long in the tooth now with faster and faster storage options being available to the home user.

When will 10GE become affordable for the masses?

Currently, the cheapest 8 port switch I've seen is around £650. With pcie adaptors being around £350 minimum.

Such a drastic jump in price over gigabit kit :o
 
What do you have that's maxing out gigabit at the moment?

I can't see 10Gb to the desktop being a priority personally, you currently only really see copper 10Gb ports appearing as SFP+ direct attach for top of rack switching with fibre as the backbone, I think you'll get developments in faster and higher quality Wi-Fi before 10Gb to the desktop becomes a thing.
 
bledd. said:
Backing up multiple machines/folders to the same server on different hard drives at the same time.
Click to expand...

You're probably better off aggregating some links in that case after getting a switch and NICs that can do that. Cheaper and provides an element of fault tolerance.

The cheapest ~10Gb is InfiniBand but to say it's fiddly is an understatement.
 
bledd. said:
Currently, the cheapest 8 port switch I've seen is around £650.
Click to expand...

You want to look a bit harder then. An XS708E is nearer £500.

I'm in a similar situation as you. I have dual port 10GbE adapters in two of my ESXi hosts and my workstation, and I've patched them together directly without a switch. But they are SFP rather than copper.

From my experience with a home lab, SFP is cheaper at the server/workstation end than copper. Adapters are often less than £100 (I paid £50 each for my Mellanox ConnectX-2 cards) and optical modules can often be found quite cheaply too (used prices obviously). And of course long fibre patch leads are very cheap too.

The copper adapters seem to hold their value better although I did see a couple this morning for around £150 each (dual port, Dell branded with Broadcom chipset). You're a little more limited on cable length of course with CAT6.

So as far as I can see at the moment - cheaper copper switch and expensive adapters, or cheaper SFP adapters and expensive SFP switch ports.

Either way it's still frustratingly expensive ;)
 
Don't do this to me I've only just got cat6 and 1gbps. I don't want to be running fibre now!

I cant see a use for it yet.. Not for 5-10 years still. When I start seeing tv manufacturers using it and other devices then I will change. 200mb broadband is being tested out now in some areas. Cant see a need for that either :D
 
If you're using Server 2012 / Windows 8, just bung some extra 1Gb RJ45 NIC's in there, SMB multichannel will sort out the rest. You don't even need expensive nics or managed switches. Whilst it'd be a pain to get up to 10Gb in terms of PCI-E slots and available switchports, you can get 3 or 4Gb/s (combining onboard nics with a dual port PCI-e card) without much hassle or expense.

I played around with this a fair bit last year, mainly for shifting game installation directories between the SSD in my gaming comp and my file server. It's pretty much plug and play :D

I also picked up some 10Gb infiniband kit cheap (£50 for two adaptors and a cable) on ebay to play around with, but theres no Server 2012/Windows 8 driver support :/
 
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I'm eternally surprised how slowly some of the peripheral equipment moves - used to be that way with Hard Drives until SSDs became mainstream - and I remember the same user arguments, "no-one needs faster hard drives - SCSI is overkill for the home market..." :p

Can you imagine if Intel/AMD decided not to release their latest chips because "they aren't needed in the home environment"? (I am aware that there is a lot of very expensive server based stuff out there but my point stands!)

I bump up against the limitations of my gigabit network all the time - I hate having to take a usb drive to the server to copy some HD content, rather than being able to pull it off the network.

Given the prices Shad mentioned I think I'm going to be looking again at 10 Gbe direct connections between the WHS and Media machines as it now looks cheaper than ac wifi - another case in point - at £200 ish for a decent router and about £150ish each for the PCI-e adapters - not much in it but no-one moans that wireless ac is "overkill" ;)
 
me too! Apart from an adapter at each end, what else is needed for fiber? I've seen some Optical modules kicking around - does it just sit in the middle?
 
For fibre you'll need a pair of 10GbE cards with SFP ports, fibre patch leads and two SFP optical modules for each patch lead (one for each end). For a direct connection between two PCs it's basically 10GbE card -> optical module -> patch lead <- optical module <- 10GbE card (except that the optical modules actually sit inside the SFP ports on the cards). It's exactly like patching two PCs together with a normal Ethernet cross-over cable, only with a few more bits of kit to break ;)

For copper it's a bit simpler, you just need a good CAT6 cable and a pair of 10GbE cards with copper ports (RJ45).

Lastly, if you go for the SFP cards and your two devices are literally no more than a couple of feet apart, you can use direct attach SFP cables. These are heavy duty copper cables with the transceiver module built in on each end. You're very limited by length and bend radius, and the signal degradation becomes a problem beyond ~10m (according to some Mellanox docs I read while back).

For my 'lab' I connect my workstation to each ESXi host with fibre patch leads and connect each host together with a direct attach cable (0.5m). I can then pull data from my SAN server (which itself is connected to each ESXi host with 4Gb fibre channel) via a VM at around 380MB/s, and vMotion between hosts at 10Gbps.

Hope that's useful. I'm just a lowly software dev playing with infrastructure so don't consider this expert advice/comment ;)
 
Hmm

The ZyXEL GS1910-24 has some 10GBe uplink ports.

If I had this and my server right next to it, would be awesome!

I've already lackrack'd my server, could bolt it all in nicely.


edit, seems it's the XGS1910-24, which costs ~5x more :D
 
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It's a shame they stuck to a 10x increase with each generation.

I wouldn't have thought that a jump to 2GBit would have been much of a stretch (technology or cost), and it'd certainly have been a useful increase. Follow that with 4Gbit, 8Gbit, 16Gbit etc. and most people would be happy.
 
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