> > On the subject of ethernet switches, are they all made equal > ? Obviously > I know that some are managed, but what are you getting when you pay > large amounts of money for fairly ordinary looking switches ? > All switches are born equal, its just that some are more equal than others... :) Have used a large variety of vendors, for a similarly large variety of applications/environments and yes, in some areas, sure, you get what you pay for, however in other areas, some are just taking the piss. As usual it depends upon your application and how much you value your data/uptime/non-worktime/sanity. The smaller, traditionally more consumer orientated vendors, are starting to add features that not even a year or so ago were strictly the preserve of high end Cisco/Extreme hardware. We have a few Netgear gigabit switches with fibre that are managed, but have nothing like the manageability of our HP and Cisco boxes. It's a basic web driven interface that allows you to fiddle around with VLANs, turn on jumbo-frames, turn on alerting and generally configure the switch sufficiently to help smaller environments help with their network. However it just doesn't have the absolute granularity of configuration compared to the higher-end switches. Most of the managed features are global settings, whereas often these could/should/would be nice to apply them at a port level. Other than the management, you are into the realms of pure performance and the hardware quality. Of course, all vendors have lemons that just don't live up to expectations, but extremely high MTBF and additional hardware based failover/error correction does add cost. As does the backplane. A fully populated 24port gig switch creates an awful amount of data (theoretically 48Gbit/sec) to shuffle around. Most high-end stuff (and some low-end too) have non-blocking backplanes, (ie the backplane can handle the theoretical maximum bandwidth) without having to drop packets. Some can't claim that. In an environment like a storage fabric or mission critical database access, dropped packets at the least mean poor performance, at the worst corrupted data. Rounding up, no they're not all created equal, however in *your* environment a low-end switch *may* be appropriate, but equally it may not. Personally, in a storage fabric (we have an iSCSI box here) I'd spend the cash. Agree with not having to pay for the Cisco name unless you particularly need a feature. Personally I really like HP ProCurve kit. Similar/same/better feature-set but generally cheaper for a similarly specced Cisco. HTH Dan -- Dan Hawker Linux Systems Administrator EADS Astrium -- This email is for the intended addressee only. If you have received it in error then you must not use, retain, disseminate or otherwise deal with it. Please notify the sender by return email. The views of the author may not necessarily constitute the views of Astrium Limited. Nothing in this email shall bind Astrium Limited in any contract or obligation. Astrium Limited, Registered in England and Wales No. 2449259 Registered Office: Gunnels Wood Road, Stevenage, Hertfordshire, SG1 2AS, England -- Linux-cluster mailing list Linux-cluster@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-cluster
