On 6/3/2014 6:57 PM, Will Dennis wrote:
Hi all,
Trying to decide which way is the better path… We currently have 12
servers running 10GbaseT, with the switch they are tied back to being an
older Extreme Networks Summit X650 (24 x 10GbT ports) which is now EOL.
The group in question wants to build out this server farm, and exceed 24
ports (I’m looking at a 48-port 10G switch, which should hold them for a
while.) The problem is, deciding between staying with the current
10GbaseT (which limits my choice of switch vendors), or changing over to
10G SFP+ (which maxes out my switch choices, but forces me to re-buy the
NICs for the 12 servers…)
Does anyone have some wisdom about making this choice, and what do folks
out there like for 10G SFP+ server NICs?
Thanks,
Will
We pretty much use all SFP+ because:
1) the switches are less expensive (though you lose it a bit on the cost
of SFP+ cables vs Cat6).
2) the SFP+ switches are lower latency (if it matters to you).
3) the SFP+ switches are more plentiful as you note.
4) You can interchangeable use 1G (with SFP+ 1g module), 10g in SFP+
DAC, or any fiber, so you have more range options.
As far as NIC, in our opinion, SolarFlare is the best. They work with
Solaris and Linux, have various options including ultra-low latency,
enterprise, and consumer, have dual and single port options, and they
are configurable out the whazoo, including various types of offloading.
The best is that you can distribute the interrupts for servicing traffic
equally across CPU cores. This is important for high traffic servers, or
you end up bottle-necked on a single CPU core that is destroyed by
interrupts. The interrupt handling can also be batched up configurably
from a low number of microseconds to a high number of milliseconds,
further offloading the host CPU. Very, very good NICs.
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