On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 09:51:01PM -0500, David Coulson wrote: > >I just looked at the Netgear website and googled for prices: > >Two Netgear GS724TS stackable switches seem to cost nearly the same as > >one GS748TS, both are supposed to have "a 20 Gbps, dual-ring, highly > >redundant stacking bus". > > The issue with most stacking switches is that you don't have any > real redundancy without either doubling up on ports so each server > is multi-homed into multiple switches, or having to manually move > ports off a dead switch. Or you could do a distributed replicated volume, and have one set of replicas on one switch and another set on the other. Incidentally, using a LAG is not going to improve your latency, and depending on workload it might not improve your peak throughput either. The algorithm which distributes the frames between links is usually a hash of src/dest MAC and/or IP addresses, so if all the traffic is between one pair of hosts, it will all go down one link. (Anything else might result in packet reordering) Depending on your requirements and budget there are now reasonably-priced 10G ethernet switches: e.g. Netgear XSM7224S (have one here, seems to work well, only using basic L2 functionality though). But you need to factor in the cost of the SFP+ NICs and the SFP+ coax cables, or fibre SFP+ modules for longer connections. 4 of the ports on that switch can do RJ45 10G too, but don't use those for anything latency-sensitive. Regards, Brian.
