On Thu, 29 May 2014, "Mathew McBride" <matt@bionicmessage.net> wrote:
The Intel 10GigE cards are well supported under Linux. There is the X520 series with Direct Attach SFP+/Twinax and the X540 supports 10GBASE-T over Cat6 (55m) / Cat6a (100m). Both come in single and dual port versions.
The signal processing and coding for 10GBASE-T is very intense; hence the X540 has a heatsink rivaling that of a low end video card. DA-SFP+ is the preferred cabling method for 10GigE, it isn't as power intensive, and is a bit cheaper too. The downside is above a couple of metres you need active cables which get a bit more expensive
http://www.staticice.com.au/cgi-bin/search.cgi?q=intel+sfp%2B&spos=1 Thanks for that information, I did a search on staticice and got $73 for a 1M cable as the cheapest price. Yikes!
As an aside, I think it would be nice if someone developed an Ethernet card and switch as one combined device. It would be a PCIe card that looks to the system like a regular Ethernet port connected to a 4 port switch with the only software visible difference being that it had 4* the bandwidth of a regular Ethernet port.
Have you looked at 802.3ad / Link Aggregation? This might achieve the outcome you want - more throughput when you have many clients taking to the same server, without the expense of 10GigE NICs and switches.
Staticice has quad port PCIe cards for $384, dual port for $99, and single port for $11. It seems that some form of bridging or bonding will be the best option. I only have one client who has real problems with GigE speed, and their problem is that when some users run batch jobs the other users get poor performance, and the cheapest solution to that will be to provide a GigE port on the server for each user who runs such batch jobs. Thanks for all the other information on 10GigE. It seems that this isn't a good choice for my budget conscious clients at this time. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/