10GbE SAN / Switch Upgrade

[MLCatRDP]

I am looking at upgrading our environment, but budget is very limited.  I was wondering if I should even bother with this route or just stick with 1GB iSCSI and purchase better components.  I can purchase the San in either 1GB or 10GB versions and am confident the SAN will work well.  My biggest concerns (or at least my vendors) is the switches I have found to support 10GbE.  He is suggesting that if there were problems Dell would not offer support because the switches are small business switches and not enterprise switches.  Has anyone tried these netgear switches on SANs?

San:  Equallogic 6110XVS - 24 300GB 15K SAS drives

Switches:  Netgear XS708E

[taylorb]

First, is there a real need for 10GbE?  Have you measured an I/O bottleneck at the network layer?  

Second, if your budget is tight enough to be considering a $1000 10GbE desktop switch, have you budgeted for the ports and cables?  We paid $600 each just for the 10GbE adapters from HP and then even using the cheap twinax SFP+ cables, they are another $300 a pop.   So you are looking at close to $2000 per host (2 adapters + 2 cables) not even factoring in the switch.   You probably can't afford to to 10Gb right, so I wouldn't. 

Just on the surface, unless you have pressing needs for 10GbE that override stability, I would not run a production  IP SAN on a desktop switch. 

[Josh26]

In a significant number of experiences, I had 100Mb Cisco switches prove to transfer traffic faster and more reliably than a Netgear gigabit switch. This was replicable time and time again, and I corrected many "mysterious performance issues" by performing what people viewed as a downgrade because a good gigabit switch was outside the budget.

I would almost certainly say you're in for the same experience throwing cheap rubbish at a 10GbE environment. If budget if a concern, buy 2 x 1Gb, quality switches. The result will almost definitely be beter.