[AusNOG] Tech Q: Looking for Cheapest 10G Switches for Hobby Lan.

[Tony]

Hi Sean,

There isn't "consumer grade" 10G gear available yet. The best you might get on the "cheap & nasty" side of things is a couple of 10G modular slots in the "high end" models of the cheap brands.

It does depend on how many ports that you want though. If you only want 4x 10G ports then you might be able to find something. If you want a full 24 ports of 10G then you're not going to find that in the consumer grade (and Extreme is a good place to start if you've got the coin).

A lot of the 10G stuff is only available in chassis based type of switches and at reasonably low port densities.

If you're prepared to save your $1k/mon budget for 12-18 months you might be able to get something for that amount of money (although in this time it may become more available).

10G NIC's are also comparatively expensive. Probably factor about $500 per NIC.

Without being too discouraging I don't think you'll find any 10G gear that is in the range you're looking for yet. There just isn't the demand for it in the market you're looking at.

Perhaps you can look at different ways of doing things with your existing setup ? I would assume that the bandwidth requirements are for people access shared "files" on a central server (as LAN gaming doesn't require that kind of bandwidth). Maybe setup a distributed server arrangement and using something like torrents to share the files so that all the users can pull from multiple servers connected at 2-4Gbps trunks each. I wouldn't imagine that any user's PC is going to have anything higher than a GB card in it, so distributing the servers across your switches might help things out ? I'm sure it can be automated somehow so that once a file is uploaded to one server the other servers replicate and seed it for everyone. This is just a stab in the dark though, depends a lot on what you are trying to achieve.


regards,
Tony.


--- On Fri, 16/7/10, Sean K. Finn <sean.finn at ozservers.com.au> wrote:

From: Sean K. Finn <sean.finn at ozservers.com.au>
Subject: [AusNOG] Tech Q: Looking for Cheapest 10G Switches for Hobby Lan.
To: "'ausnog at ausnog.net'" <ausnog at ausnog.net>
Received: Friday, 16 July, 2010, 12:18 PM




 
 






Hi All, 

   

Some of our staff run a hobby LAN one day a month that
attracts about 100 players for 12-24 hours. 

   

Currently the guys are running multi 1GB trunks, some 6GB
trunks between switches and 4GB trunks to servers for the day, but there has
been talk of wanting to experiment with 10Gb gear at a hobby level.  

   

The budget isn’t huge, maybe about $1,000 per month to
spend on gear, but LAN days are usually good test beds to skill up and play
with this kind of gear. 

   

My Question is :What’s the cheapest and nastiest 10Gb
consumer grade gear, if it exists yet, that anyone knows about? 

   

Both switches and cards. 

   

Some of the guys mentioned http://www.extremenetworks.com/ ,
not sure if this is nasty enough though? 

   

Cheers, 

Sean. 

 



      
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