Recommend me a iSCSI GIGABIT switch please?

[islack]

Hi guys,

I am looking to implement gigabit iscis and heard that the performance varies on many different switches, I will be doing Storage traffic on the switch.

- Traffic Control

- Gigabit

- Jumbo Frames

- sFlow

- SNMP

is what I am planning on using. Any advice/suggestions would be greatly appreciated, I am looking for used/refurb as my budget is ~$1000 for the switch. Looking at ebay also, so any good experiences with model numbers will help me find them there and elsewhere.

Thanks

[mike_laspina]

Hi,

Your going to need two of them, this model will do the trick.

HP ProCurve Switch 1810G-24 - switch - 24 ports

Regards,

Mike

vExpert 2009

[islack]

Thanks Mike but i was under the impression that procurve switches dont

support flow control and jumbo packets at the same time?

Sent from my iPhone

On May 14, 2010, at 1:33 PM, "mike.laspina" <communities-emailer@vmware.com

[rogard]

To be honest any thing from the main brands is good my favs are procurve,extreme and cisco.

Just becareful with jumbos as they are not all equal.

You would hate for you switch to be pushing frames that ur san considers giants for example.

[mike_laspina]

Hi,

On that budget you may have to compromise, I have run small environments with the 1800 or 2900 series and there are no major drawbacks going without jumbo frames unless you need to work with other protocols like FCoE and I'm sure that's not the case.

vExpert 2009

[AndreTheGiant]

Have a look also at Dell PowerConnect 5xxx series.

Andre

[golddiggie]

HP ProCurve 2510G-24 should do it (since that's what I have)... You can find them on ebay for <$1000 although I went through a vendor and picked mine up for ~$700 last year. A quick lookup shows that Newegg has it for $799.99...

You'll want to use the FULL CLI, present in the 2510G line, not the 1810G line, to make a lot of the settings changes. There's really good documentation out there on doing this. Send me a private message (with an email address) if you need the full CLI command document for ProCurve switches)...

Otherwise, you're looking at the 2910al series of ProCurve switches. Those start at around $1800 for the 24 port model.

Network Administrator

VMware VCP4

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[J1mbo]

FWIW I think D-Link are often overlooked, but they have some decent products in this price range.

Also I wouldn't get too excited about jumbos, I'm driving 220MB/s through an EqualLogic array with 2x GbE's only with no jumbo. Much more important to look at switching latency and stability IMO.

http://blog.peacon.co.uk

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[ian_wills]

+1 on the D-Link, they have their idiosyncrasies in terms of their adapted version of the Cisco CatOS, and the hardware longevity can be questionable on the cheaper commodity switches, but the raw performance and functionality is there for someone on a budget.

Our production environment is running on a pair of stacked DXS-3227's (CX-4 48gbps backplane) running Jumbo Frames with an Equalogic PS5000E (3 ports active). Our switches cost us about $2500 each, plus the CX4 modules at around $1200 total. You can stack using CAT6 at 1GB/s but then your backplane will not be non-blocking.

I'm still working on iSCSI performance; one of our issues is we see about 100-150ms disk latency when using our QLE4062c HBA's, compared to about 5-6ms disk latency on the Software iSCSI initiators (using MPIO).

[J1mbo]

That number sounds like it could be related to Nagle.

http://blog.peacon.co.uk

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