Hi Alex,
We run our backbone at 10GbE with Nortel kit, after a recommendation of
the 5510-48T by our network folk back in 2004/5.
Our setup is a star formation with a central unit and edge units.
For the edges, we have 'stacks' of 5510-48T and 5530-24TFD units
handling both disks and CPU nodes together. The switches use a 40Gb/s
backbone interconnect over (short - up to 16 ft) distances and act as a
single logical unit with up to eight units per stack, so up to 384 1GbE
ports per stack or 360 1GbE poets if you put at 5530 in for a 10GbE
uplink.
In the centre we have a stack of 5530 units providing mostly just the
10GbE interconnects to the Tier1 stacks, and uplinks to our site
routers, which happen to be Nortel Passport (8600) series systems. We
are currently looking to replace our central stack with something that
gives more 10GbE ports.
They work well, and we have had no hardware failures in our 9 x 5530 and
18 x 5510 units.
Our experiments with inter-switch trunking of 1GbE links were not overly
sucessful but I think that was more to do with the host layout than a
failing of the switches.
Get in touch if you want more information.
Cheers,
Martin.
--
Martin Bly
RAL Tier1 Fabric Team
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Testbed Support for GridPP member institutes
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Alex Martin
> Sent: 28 November 2007 12:13
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: 10 Gbit ethernet.
>
> We are looking into upgrading our HTC network backbone to 10 Gbit.
> Has anyone here had any experience, good or bad with
> switches/cards etc?
> Also CX4 vs fibre?
>
> cheers,
> Alex
>
> --
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> ----------------
> |
> |
> | Dr. Alex Martin
> |
> | e-Mail: [log in to unmask] Queen Mary,
> University of London, |
> | Phone : +44-(0)20-7882-5033 Mile End Road,
> |
> | Fax : +44-(0)20-8981-9465 London, UK E1 4NS
> |
> |
> |
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> ----------------
>
|