[Gllug] Ethernet switch recommendation

[Richard Jones]

On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 12:39:31PM -0000, Walter Stanish wrote:
> The SAN vendors we spoke to recently emphasised that many
> gigabit switches (IIRC notoriously a popular lower-end
> model from a leading vendor starting with the third
> letter of the alphabet) are (words to the effect of)
> 'absolute garbage'.

I certainly agree with them.  You can use udpcast[1] to test multicast
performance of switches very easily.  I did this with a selection of
switches from the "very cheap" end of the market a couple of years
ago, and "absolute garbage" would be an accurate description of the
results.

Obviously I need this for a home network setup, but my use case is
probably pretty exceptional for the home user - ie. lots of NFS and
proxied HTTP traffic, and huge VM and Fedora/RHEL ISO images being
shuffled around between machines on a regular basis.

Wifi is a total failure for me, but since I'm moving house shortly
I've decided to put structured cabling in the new house and solve this
problem properly once and for all.  The switch I buy will be at the
centre of this, connected to ~ 6 fixed machines (and some floating
laptops using wifi still).  Budget for the switch would be in the
100-200 UKP region and I'd want the solution to last for 5-10 years.

Rich.

[1] http://udpcast.linux.lu/

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat
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