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Cheap Gigabit Ether

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the faster-than-a-speeding-bullet dept.

Avrice writes "National semiconductors gigbit ethernet is backwards compatible with existing systems and smart enough to fix your wiring screw ups for only $95. Maybe bandwidth (at least on the network) won't be such a problem after all."

2 of 220 comments (clear)

  1. Poor man's SAN by XNormal · · Score: 4

    This type of low cost high-speed connectivity could bring the benefits of a SAN (Storage Area Network) architecture to those who can't afford a FibreChannel based system.

    The storage server can be based on PC architecture with a stripped-down linux kernel, emulating FibreChannel over gigabit ethernet. It has no notion or filesystems, users or anything like that - it is optimized to just ships disk sectors to the network at maximum performance.

    The application servers can be diskless or use their local disks only for swap and caching. One ethernet interface will connect to the internet and another will support access to the SAN. Replacing or upgrading such servers is easy when they store no state information.

    XFS is capable of letting two or more systems share access to the same disk at the sector level.
    I don't know if the linux port of XFS will support this feature, but assuming it does this could be very useful for this kind of applications.


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    Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
  2. HUB? by snack · · Score: 4

    Sure, you can get a fairly inexpensive gigabit ethernet card, but how much is the hub gonna cost. You can only connect 2 computers through a Null Cable (cross over).

    (First?)