[tech] 10G switch

[Andrew Adamson]

Hi All,

There has been some talk on irc about getting a 10G switch for the machine 
room. We have wanted 10G for many years now, but we've never had enough 
extra cash available. The price has also come down a fair bit in the last 
couple of years. A 10G switch would allow us to improve the connectivity 
between our storage and our VM hosts (molmol, maltair, medico, loveday), 
and allow us to meaningfully experiment with clustered storage.

[TRS] suggested an Ubiquiti EdgeSwitch16 - XG, available for around 
$870 from
http://www.citytechnology.com.au/store/edgeswitch-fiber-es-16-xg-10gig-rj45-sfp-plus-ubiquiti-australia
or http://ubwh.com.au/product_info.php?products_id=475

The ubiquiti switch has 4 RJ-45 ports and 12 SFP+ ports. If we want to use 
the SFP+ ports, we would have to buy some 10G direct-attach-copper (DAC) 
cables at around $100 per cable. We may or may not have to use SFP+ yet, 
depending on which 10G cards we get for the servers - though with only 4 
RJ-45 ports and the need for an uplink on at least one of those ports, I 
suspect we will need at least one or two.

Another option I found, which admittedly gives us fewer total ports, is 
something like this, which has all RJ-45 ports, and is only around $150 
more expensive: 
https://www.mwave.com.au/product/netgear-prosafe-xs708t-8-port-10-gigabit-ethernet-smart-managed-switch-ab82897

Now I don't know a great deal about 10G switching and what is 
economical/good. Do others have any opinions/advice/thoughts on this?

Andrew Adamson
bob at ucc.asn.au

|"If you can't beat them, join them, and then beat them."                |
| ---Peter's Laws                                                        |