You could get a cisco switch that supports cut through instead of store-and-forward, for lower latency. Other than that, compare the port to port forwarding times and see if there is a difference between the switches you are looking at (probably not) and make your decision based on that. Consider connecting everything to two switches, for failover in case a switch breaks? On 1/27/2012 2:04 PM, Dan Bretherton wrote: > Dear All, > I need to buy a bigger GigE switch for my GlusterFS cluster and I am > trying to decide whether or not a much more expensive one would be > justified. I have limited experience with networking so I don't know > if it would be appropriate to spend ?500, ?1500 or ?3500 for a 48-port > switch. Those rough costs are based on a comparison of 3 Dell > Powerconnect switches: the 5548 (bigger version of what we have now), > the 6248 and the 7048. The servers in the cluster are nothing special > - mostly Supermicro with SATA drives and 1GigE network adapters. I > can only justify spending more than ~?500 if I can be sure that users > would notice the difference. Some of the users' applications do lots > of small reads and writes, and they do run much more slowly if all the > servers are not connected to the same switch, as is the case now while > I don't have a big enough switch. Any advice or comments would be > much appreciated. > > Regards > Dan. > _______________________________________________ > Gluster-users mailing list > Gluster-users at gluster.org > http://gluster.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gluster-users
