10 GB Top of rack switches

[caddo]

Hi,

customers keep asking more and more to connect to their present networks 10 GB appliances/servers.

It's difficult to find out the best price/quality/number of ports balance.

What do you guys suggest for a customer to start? Usually SFP+ are the most common interfaces for those appliances/servers, but when i check prices i see things from $20.000 up.

Thank you.

[caddo]

Nobody can help?

Really?

[logiboy123]

I'm not really sure what the question is that you are trying to ask.

10GbE networking is expensive and populating a datacentre will layer 3 routing switches in a redundant configuration will cost easily in the tens of thousands if not more, depending of course on the size of the environment and the equipment being plugged into it.

Regards,

Paul

[meistermn]

Have a look at the vmworld 2011  document VSP2247 10Gb & FCoE Real World Design Considerations "

[caddo]

logiboy123,

what i am trying to accomplish is introducing 10gb for those customers who nowdays are still using 1gb ethernet.

I am obviously not talking about high-end datacenter customers but i am more focused on midsize business here.

A lot of storage. servers and blade chassis come with standard SFP+ interfaces that sometimes customers cannot use because they have no switch to uplink these interfaces to and when they see the costs their enthusiasm simply drops, like i could use 10gb if i could plug it in but i can't...

I'm talking about intra host traffic like vMotion, storage replication, FT, NFS, other clustering technologies, etc.., not replacing the whole datacenter networking with 10gb so i figure you don't need many ports when you start.

If I start looking at vendors like Cisco, Arista, Juniper most of the time you are out of budget already; i was looking for a modular approach i saw from HP that will let you buy modules with 4 or 8 ports modules for $2500 and grow as you go. I know HP but i am open to any solution that applies to my use case.

I hope i made myself more clear now, thank you.

[logiboy123]

Ebay.

Buy second hand equipment. This is the only cheap option. You would need a core switch capable of layer 3 routing, which you could plug the smaller top-of-rack modules into. HP and Dell have the cheapest "dumb" spf+ switches.

[LaurinDavis]

Depending on the specifics of your customer chargeback model, another approach to introducing 10GbE might be to focus on the number of ports consumed by trunking.

By using 10Gb ports for trunking, you free up top of rack (access layer) ports for attaching more end devices, and increase the bandwidth of your trunked uplinks at the same time. The result is an increase in network capacity and an increase in network performance.

In addition to uplinks, you need to make sure that your upstream (distribution and core) switches are equipped with as many 10Gb ports as possible (and as few 1Gb ports as possible).  Otherwise, as you start to add more and more 10Gb server connections to the top of rack switches, the rest of the Ethernet fabric will end up being badly oversubscribed.  Unlike vSphere, physical networks don't handle oversubscription that well.