You really need a public apology from a guy named "BaconBits" in the slashdot comments section? I wouldn't wipe my ass with a printout of his comment history. I think we can all just move on.
Oh, and it is entirely true - because Arista ships products _today_. So as of right now, what I said is absolutely correct. No one can touch that density. What happens tomorrow we'll see, but as of right now, Arista is king of the hill as far as sheer 10GbE density, bar none.
No secret, just ask them, they'll tell you the exact vendors of their ASICs (hint: it hasn't always been Broadcom). Their whole business model is built on being able to use the best silicon available and layering the software on top of that.
You're not considering FC overhead. Why are you comparing a fiber channel GBIC to a 10Gb CNA? That's like comparing the price of a car to the price of a muffler. You need FC HBAs just like you need 10Gb CNAs. And they cost as much, or usually more, than a CNA.
I'm glad I'm not the only one having the problem. Seems like I can barely fill a third of a rack before I'm bumping up against the amount of power they will deliver to a single rack. It's getting ridiculous.
Cisco rep emailed me today to tell me that the Layer 3 daughter cards for the 5548P will be available starting in March. The list ("not to exceed") price is ~$17k. Figure the usual 30%+ off that.
So unless you can build out 1Gb for less than $150/port (and have enough space for 10x the ports!) then 10GbE starts looking pretty attractive. But it depends on the size of the isntall, if we start considering a core/distribution/access architecture and including all the upstream ports, etc, it could get incredibly expensive. You could also include cost to install, configure, manage, etc. But if we're just talking basic per port pricing, under $2k is very easy.
$350 per port is "insanely expensive" to you? Well let's see, its 10x the bandwidth of gigabit ethernet at 10x the density. So you pay LESS THAN $35 per port for gigabit?
What made you think it was the IP overhead? What was the configuration like? We run iSCSI in a lab and we get >920Mb/s over copper gig-e.
What do you mean you're using SAS? Are you using DAS and then something like NFS? That doesn't make a lot of sense, SAS isn't really an alternative to a SAN.
Look into Arista Networks. Founded by Andy B, who founded Sun, and Granite 1Gb switches that he sold to cisco before running their gig-e switch line. You're looking at copper 10Gb ports for about $500 a piece. Optical for about $500/port and about $150, if I remember right, for 10Gb sr transceivers. Layer 2-4, runs linux kernel (fedora kernel specifically, if I recall) along with a gnu userland and will run every port at wirespeed. Plus you can get 48 10Gb ports in 1U. No one else in the industry can touch that density, especially their 11U switch with 384 10Gb wirespeed ports. Pretty health feature support as well, even including things like MLAG, their TRILL implementation.
CPU cost? With iSCSI off-load I'd always assumed (incorrectly?) that the difference in CPU load between FC and iSCSI was somewhere between non-existant and negligible. What about when using dedicated iSCSI "HBA" ?
woah woah lets calm down no one is trying to sell you a 10gb home router. literally no one, on earth, there isn't even a product that exists for home users thats 10gb. i was with you up until that point. shit, gigabit is still relegated to "performance" oriented home products for the most part.
First of all, the Internet _is_ provided by satellite, to a lot of people. Second of all, the latency is probably better than the latency i get on verizon 3g aircards. And seriously, do you think the target audience is going to complain about 600, 800 or even more milliseconds of latency?
Agree 100%. We went through the same thing with active-active vs active-passive, you gain nothing from active-active other than complexity, at least for every scenario we came up with. And yes, ASAs are very quirky firewalls, no question about it. The 8.3 NAT change was especially annoying. Would also like to be able to use some virtual contexts in transparent and some in non-transparent (to terminate ipsec tunnels). I'm definitely not in love with them, but they're not awful.
Unfortunately you pay through the nose for Cisco gear. We run a 100% Cisco shop (routers, switches, firewalls, CUCM/Unity, many hundreds of Cisco IP phones, ACS, etc etc etc ad naseum) and it's really nice and we have no compatibility problems, but man do we pay through the nose. Even with 40%+ discounts off Cisco's hilarious "list prices" it's still unbelievably expensive. We're seriously considering looking into Juniper for our next router replacement (we just rolled out 2921s to ~50 sites, so it'll be a while) and we're piloting Aruba Networks wireless at one of our facilities. I'm even looking at Arista Networks 10Gb switches for a new datacenter deployment. Literally about 1/4 to 1/3 the price per 10Gb port (once you factor in optics) as compared to a Nexus 5k.
No. It started with you asking for an example of a phone that met a long list of criteria. I listed phones that met all of them except price, which it matched with respect to the iPhone. Except in one case, where the device was cheaper, but you said that device didn't count because it had inferior graphics, which I said I didn't care about.
Not a great analogy, because businesses all over the world are replacing traditional desk phones with softphones like Cisco's IP Communicator or Skype every day. Just because computers weren't designed to make phone calls doesn't mean they aren't exceptionally good at it. That "clunky Dell workstation" using something like Cisco Unified Personal Communicator will blow an iPhone out of the water as a communications device. Integrating voice, video, presence, messaging all into a single application that let's you switch between them seamlessly. The only limitation is that it's not portable.
Again, the iPad is a big iPhone. Not a big "phone". It's a larger version of an iPhone, the only difference is it doesn't make cellular calls. If you think making phone calls is the primary distinguishing factor of an iPhone I think you've been asleep for the last 4 years. If you think that an iPad is closer to a laptop than it is to an iPhone, you've clearly never used either device. It's not a "big phone" it's "basically a big iPhone". I don't know how else to explain it. And this isn't an intended as an insult. Turns out a big iPhone is an amazing device! I really love using mine.
The Incredible has more graphics capabilities than I require, and I don't know how it compares to the iPhone, or care really. I'm an adult, so I don't play video games on a cellphone. Also some android phones have 4G, as well as expandable storage, and lots of other features not found in the iPhone. So, yes, for the same price as an iPhone you get a physically larger display, 4G in some cases, expandable storage, etc. Correct.
Slashdot Mirror
You really need a public apology from a guy named "BaconBits" in the slashdot comments section? I wouldn't wipe my ass with a printout of his comment history. I think we can all just move on.
Wow really? What exactly did you do?
Oh, and it is entirely true - because Arista ships products _today_. So as of right now, what I said is absolutely correct. No one can touch that density. What happens tomorrow we'll see, but as of right now, Arista is king of the hill as far as sheer 10GbE density, bar none.
No secret, just ask them, they'll tell you the exact vendors of their ASICs (hint: it hasn't always been Broadcom). Their whole business model is built on being able to use the best silicon available and layering the software on top of that.
Massively decreased complexity and huge reduction in switching infrastructure costs?
You're not considering FC overhead. Why are you comparing a fiber channel GBIC to a 10Gb CNA? That's like comparing the price of a car to the price of a muffler. You need FC HBAs just like you need 10Gb CNAs. And they cost as much, or usually more, than a CNA.
(0.03% packet loss == approx. 50% performance cut.)
Do you have a link to back that up? That would be very interesting if true.
Yes, it's licensed base, with Cisco at least. You have to buy the storage license to be able to configure ports as storage ports.
I'm glad I'm not the only one having the problem. Seems like I can barely fill a third of a rack before I'm bumping up against the amount of power they will deliver to a single rack. It's getting ridiculous.
Cisco rep emailed me today to tell me that the Layer 3 daughter cards for the 5548P will be available starting in March. The list ("not to exceed") price is ~$17k. Figure the usual 30%+ off that.
For 10GbE?
$367 for a 10GbE port, $454 optics/port, $691 Intel 10GbE NIC (dual port too)
Total: $1,512/port
So unless you can build out 1Gb for less than $150/port (and have enough space for 10x the ports!) then 10GbE starts looking pretty attractive. But it depends on the size of the isntall, if we start considering a core/distribution/access architecture and including all the upstream ports, etc, it could get incredibly expensive. You could also include cost to install, configure, manage, etc. But if we're just talking basic per port pricing, under $2k is very easy.
$350 per port is "insanely expensive" to you? Well let's see, its 10x the bandwidth of gigabit ethernet at 10x the density. So you pay LESS THAN $35 per port for gigabit?
You think 10Gb ports at "hundreds of dollars" is expensive? I pay that much for 1Gb ports from Cisco.
What made you think it was the IP overhead? What was the configuration like? We run iSCSI in a lab and we get >920Mb/s over copper gig-e.
What do you mean you're using SAS? Are you using DAS and then something like NFS? That doesn't make a lot of sense, SAS isn't really an alternative to a SAN.
Look into Arista Networks. Founded by Andy B, who founded Sun, and Granite 1Gb switches that he sold to cisco before running their gig-e switch line. You're looking at copper 10Gb ports for about $500 a piece. Optical for about $500/port and about $150, if I remember right, for 10Gb sr transceivers. Layer 2-4, runs linux kernel (fedora kernel specifically, if I recall) along with a gnu userland and will run every port at wirespeed. Plus you can get 48 10Gb ports in 1U. No one else in the industry can touch that density, especially their 11U switch with 384 10Gb wirespeed ports. Pretty health feature support as well, even including things like MLAG, their TRILL implementation.
More importantly we have a plethora of new ethernet extensions that are designed to accommodate lossless traffic.
CPU cost? With iSCSI off-load I'd always assumed (incorrectly?) that the difference in CPU load between FC and iSCSI was somewhere between non-existant and negligible. What about when using dedicated iSCSI "HBA" ?
woah woah lets calm down no one is trying to sell you a 10gb home router. literally no one, on earth, there isn't even a product that exists for home users thats 10gb. i was with you up until that point. shit, gigabit is still relegated to "performance" oriented home products for the most part.
First of all, the Internet _is_ provided by satellite, to a lot of people. Second of all, the latency is probably better than the latency i get on verizon 3g aircards. And seriously, do you think the target audience is going to complain about 600, 800 or even more milliseconds of latency?
Where are my mod points when I need them. Amen, brother.
Agree 100%. We went through the same thing with active-active vs active-passive, you gain nothing from active-active other than complexity, at least for every scenario we came up with. And yes, ASAs are very quirky firewalls, no question about it. The 8.3 NAT change was especially annoying. Would also like to be able to use some virtual contexts in transparent and some in non-transparent (to terminate ipsec tunnels). I'm definitely not in love with them, but they're not awful.
Unfortunately you pay through the nose for Cisco gear. We run a 100% Cisco shop (routers, switches, firewalls, CUCM/Unity, many hundreds of Cisco IP phones, ACS, etc etc etc ad naseum) and it's really nice and we have no compatibility problems, but man do we pay through the nose. Even with 40%+ discounts off Cisco's hilarious "list prices" it's still unbelievably expensive. We're seriously considering looking into Juniper for our next router replacement (we just rolled out 2921s to ~50 sites, so it'll be a while) and we're piloting Aruba Networks wireless at one of our facilities. I'm even looking at Arista Networks 10Gb switches for a new datacenter deployment. Literally about 1/4 to 1/3 the price per 10Gb port (once you factor in optics) as compared to a Nexus 5k.
No. It started with you asking for an example of a phone that met a long list of criteria. I listed phones that met all of them except price, which it matched with respect to the iPhone. Except in one case, where the device was cheaper, but you said that device didn't count because it had inferior graphics, which I said I didn't care about.
Not a great analogy, because businesses all over the world are replacing traditional desk phones with softphones like Cisco's IP Communicator or Skype every day. Just because computers weren't designed to make phone calls doesn't mean they aren't exceptionally good at it. That "clunky Dell workstation" using something like Cisco Unified Personal Communicator will blow an iPhone out of the water as a communications device. Integrating voice, video, presence, messaging all into a single application that let's you switch between them seamlessly. The only limitation is that it's not portable.
Again, the iPad is a big iPhone. Not a big "phone". It's a larger version of an iPhone, the only difference is it doesn't make cellular calls. If you think making phone calls is the primary distinguishing factor of an iPhone I think you've been asleep for the last 4 years. If you think that an iPad is closer to a laptop than it is to an iPhone, you've clearly never used either device. It's not a "big phone" it's "basically a big iPhone". I don't know how else to explain it. And this isn't an intended as an insult. Turns out a big iPhone is an amazing device! I really love using mine.
The Incredible has more graphics capabilities than I require, and I don't know how it compares to the iPhone, or care really. I'm an adult, so I don't play video games on a cellphone. Also some android phones have 4G, as well as expandable storage, and lots of other features not found in the iPhone. So, yes, for the same price as an iPhone you get a physically larger display, 4G in some cases, expandable storage, etc. Correct.