Paul S. schreef op 12-5-2015 om 15:36:
Hi guys,
We're shortly going to be getting some 10G SANs, and I was wondering what people were using as SAN switches for 10G SANs.
In one location a HP Procurve 8212zl with 8 SFP+ module, and a 8Gbe module. Here i'm using a Dell EQL PS6210 SSD cabinet and 24 SATA disk EQL cabinet on 10G. In another location on a budget a Netgear M7100 24X with a Dell EQL PS6010 with Intel S3500 800GB SSDs. In both locations the switches appear to be doing fine in combination with VMware ESXi 5.5 and Intel X540-2 cards.
It is my understanding that low buffer sizes make most 'normal' 10G ethernet switches unsuitable for the job.
Not so sure on that, opinions vary a lot here. Similar to the stance on Flow Control where one vendor will advocate using it and another advocates against it. If you only have a single link, then Flow control will sleep the connection which can impact your performance with a higher Queue depth. For multiple 1G links the impact is ofcourse a lot less overall. If you are going to invest in a new SAN make sure to ditch spinning rust, it's the biggest breakthrough in storage since a while and it's a factor of a *lot*. The price doesn't break the bank either, the Dell EQL 6110 was out of warranty, retail value around $3500 us. The 18 Intel S3500 SSDs were about 11k euro (16 + 2 spare). In raid 6 that's a good 10TB of storage. It's a shame that SAN HQ keeps emailing us once a day that the drives are not original ;) With that sheer amount of space it's going to take a while before it ever breaks (wears out). It'll be out of service long before then. Also, you can max out a single 10G link with about 4-6 recent SSDs, so smaller cabinets with more uplinks make all the sense. In that respect the newer cabinets (Dell EQL PS6210) with 24 drives and just 2 10Ge uplinks are a bit odd. Still, it's nice to do 300-400MB/s in a VM on a 5 year old ESX on a dime. :)
We're pretty much an exclusive Juniper shop, but are not biased in any way -- best tool for the job is what I've been tasked with to find.
Keeping that in mind, how would something like a EX4550 fare in the role? Are there better devices in the same price range?
If the switches work for you and you are comfortable with them I'd count that as a better argument. Only budget switches are likely to cause you real grief here. Kind regards, Seth