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Foundry's been doing this for a while now

nah, cisco's equipment would never handle that amount of traffic. You'd have to go with Foundry networks, force 10, or some other company with similar stuff.

I doubt cisco has numbers to match stuff like this:
http://www.foundrynet.com/products/l3backbone/bigi ron/BI_RX.html

That's mostly layer 2 networking (though that switch does layer 3 routing as well). They still have juniper and other manufacturers to deal with that have way more impressive products than them.

Invest carefully

http://www.foundrynet.com/products/webswitches/ser veriron/PDFs/ServerIron_LB FINAL.pdf
(if it doesn't work, go to foundry networks website and look for serveriron link balancer)

they provide means of load balancing traffic across multiple links (max of 6 t3 or 2 oc3 capacity) without having to go through complex bgp stuff.

No, most new switches use store-and-forward, especially when they have gigabit-or-faster ports. The latency "penalty" involved in store-and-forward switching becomes less and less noticable at faster network speeds, thus making cut-through undesirable (i.e. its costs outweigh its benefits). As an example, look at Foundry's EdgeIron 8X10G:

http://www.foundrynet.com/services/documentation/e dgeiron_install/7_intro_8X10G.html

It employs store-and-forward, as do most new Cisco switches (if I remember correctly). I can understand why certain ultra-latency-sensitive applications may still require cut-through switching, but 95% of all other applications won't gain much from being on a cut-through switch.

You can get an InfiniBand switch for 24 10 gigibit ports at full speed from SilverStorm, Cisco, Voltaire, HP, IBM, etc. All are based on a mellanox ASIC and probably under $1000/port. I found an HP box for 6500 on froogle just now. I am sure there are boxes at this level for eternet switching and ip routing. Check out this monster from Foundry. From here, it has "3.84 Terabits per second of backplane switching capacity".
-Ack

You can get an InfiniBand switch for 24 10 gigibit ports at full speed from SilverStorm, Cisco, Voltaire, HP, IBM, etc. All are based on a mellanox ASIC and probably under $1000/port. I found an HP box for 6500 on froogle just now. I am sure there are boxes at this level for eternet switching and ip routing. Check out this monster from Foundry. From here, it has "3.84 Terabits per second of backplane switching capacity".
-Ack

More info on cookie switching

And what about the Foundry BigIron series?

While you do have the basic idea down, your suggestion of a clustering FS isn't the best for your application. You are describing "vertical scaling", which GFS and clusters will be very good for. Web serving is not a good place for a cluster--"horizontal scaling" is how you scale most web sites and web applications. Typically, for web serving, you will have a block of content that can fit on the hard disk of the average web server.

The best way to deliver this to the user (in this case, the slashdotter) would be to replicate this content onto a group of web servers using rsync(1). Each machine serves the content off of its local drive and can use its memory to cache/buffer the disk reads. In front of the web servers, you would put a wire-speed load balancer, such as an Nortel Alteon content switch or a Foundry Networks ServerIron switch. The load balancer, when configured properly will take care of monitoring your web servers. It would take me too long to explain it here, but these switches are sophisticated enough that they can take failed webservers out of the load-balancing group for everything from a ping failure to a content failure.

The key to designing web architectures is simplicity. Web serving does not need fancy clustering software or distributed filesystems. Very few web sites will not fit on the hard disk of your average 1U server. Keep it simple and put the intelligence up front in the switch.

What is GFS good for? Many things! It would be great for a large computational cluster that had a very large (multi-terabyte) dataset and high disk I/O requirements. Anything that has a requirement to provide one or more very large files to a number of cluster nodes would be perfect for GFS.

Chris

No, no it's not. I don't see any OC boards available for it. It's specs aren't too great either: "96Gbps backplane capacity, 240Gbps max bandwidth , maximum throughput 177Mpps." Compare that with a 1.28 Tbps switching capacity and a 480 Mpps routing capacity for a Foundry MG8. A Cisco 6500 series also has a MUCH higher switching capacity (720 Gbps or so, depending on the SUP). So, in summation, 3Com is clearly behind on things.

For the same money you'd spend on a Cisco switch you can probably buy a Nortel that'll run circles around the Cisco.

Or, if your tripping over the bags of cash or their just blocking the door, you could spring for a Juniper...

> " Ummmm... Wouldn't you fry the motherboard by swapping a CPU when the computer's on?" Think Enterprise environment and Big Iron, not desktop machines.

Yeah but my comment was more regarding the use of Big Iron. The only Big Iron I ever heard of is this and I do not believe for one minute that Linux is the operating system on foundry switches. Yet again my question is why would someone need to switch out a processor on a switch without powering it off?

Given the fact that you want no video, it seems you need servers on the cheap. If you're actually buying thousands (or really more than ten or so) of machines, I suggest you go with an integrator like XRam or Fnord. They'll build whatever you want for you, configure everything EXACTLY the same, test everything, install & do a basic config (i.e. network config and root password) for any OS you want, and install your machines on site. I'm sure the'll give you a nice quantity discount if you buy in the numbers you're talking about.

Don't even THINK about deploying that quantity of machines without racking them in a proper datacenter type environment (cooling, ample redundant AC power feeds, generator, decent physical security, etc.); FORGET about normal PC cases on Ikea shelves in your basement/office. Whatever cash you would save doing it the ghetto way is absolutely not worth the headache of blowing breakers, having your ambient temp at 35-40C and grilling PC parts if your cheap-o electro-cool chiller dies or spills its bin of water all over the place, your local power company decides you're not important, etc.

That being said, here are a few links for what I'd build if I had to do it myself on the cheap (try googlegear.com for good qty. 1 prices on this stuff:

Elite K7S5AL mobo (integrated lan)
1.2 GHz AMD Duron with a really good fan (i.e. Tai-Sol or similar overclocker freak fan)
at least 512M of brand-name CAS2 ECC DDR SDRAM
Western Digital JB series hard drive (WD800JB or WD1200JB)
Netgear FA311 NIC

The cheapest 2u rack case on the net seems to be the Electroseller IPC-2025 at $118 without power supply and fans. It takes nomal ATX size CDRom, floppy, power supply, fans, etc. pricewatch is your friend (-:.

This should net you a pretty sweet 2u rackable server for about $500. I envy not the man that has to assemble more than about 10 of these things by himself. Maybe those chainmail gloves that people that shuck clams for a living use would help.

If you want to do something with the data on these machines, you'll probably want to stick a pair (yes, a pair) of big ethernet switches in front of them. I suggest Foundry or Extreme. You can buy these "certified used" from BizInt.

"Imagine a beow..." (-:

You're not very aware. Cisco Foundry Juniper [fill in the blank here]

I don't know about you, but I'm able to multicast financial data across our network to over 2000 hosts without causing significant problems at all. use good switches, that have capable backplanes. wirespeed is a good thing.

(www.foundrynet.com)

the online brokerage I work for uses foundry networking equipment, and it has the option to use SSH (and only SSH) as a connectivity method. I've got to say that it now is as slick as all our unix boxen, and I'm loving it... They also make their firmware upgrades available for free, so I haven't had to pay for feature adds. (cough cough *cisco* cough) That, and the wire speed gigabit ethernet rocks too... 480Gbps backplane on those beasties.