How fast are your links to feeder cabinets? What are you using Fibre/Ethernet, both?

[ITGURU]

Not much point in focussing on remote cabling if the server structure itself is not going to deliver anything. A RAID with 10 drives is going to struggle to fill a gigabit link and indeed might only have gigabit links to your main switch...hopefully some link agrregagated ones....

 

And massive disk RAIDs, even those with SSDs are not always much better as they uses SAS expanders which limit overall data rates. Only if you have NVMe drives in the server and the server has 10G link to main switch would I start worrying about what was further away. Yes, aggregating some 1Gb links to main switch would be a useful addition.

 

Running video editing to lots of stations via a network is of course questionable as a concept...and I doubt that is going to work very well without serious investment throughout. Better to have a load of local storage to work with as temporary space.

 

We have old pre om1 fibre which runs just fine at 10gb...albeit over a distance of 100m or less. And we use aggregated links throughout between core switches and perimeter, for redundancy if not bandwidth. Yes we have some mono mode high grade fibre for long runs. We think 1gb to desktop makes a differnce for user experience even though our servers would struggle collectively to deliver this to multiple stations sat a time.

 

...and of course wireless and ever increasing external bandwidth, schools I know of gave 1gb leased lines, need bandwdth in the infrastructure to deliver it to ac access points.

 

A 10GB backbone doesn't mean you need 10GB to servers - I have 4 gb aggregated bandwidth on my servers.

 

It's an available bandwidth so means you could be transferring data from multiple servers down the 10GB pipe, it doesnt have to be a 1 to 1 connection.

[DrCheese]

What are you all using for your core switches? I'm still running a 1GB core & it's creeking a bit - Cost of buying 10gb switches is painful tho right now

[AlanD]

How do you know its creaking? How do you know its not your servers? Or the links to your edge switches? Or indeed the 100Mb/s network interfaces in your PCs. No point in in holding your finger in the air and thinking "perhaps I'll upgrade the switches" - because that might not be where the problems lies...assuming there is a problem. The danger is you could - as you describe- invest a considerable sum in 10G switches and no one will notice a difference - which would be a complete waste.

 

In the first instance - I would be putting LAGs between core and edge switches....not least of all because it provides you with redundancy...and next, because it costs almost nothing....other than some configuration and would almost certainly provide you with the added bandwidth your require. . To fill a 10GB link anywhere probably requires a server farm and a massive SAN. I bet you have at least two cores of fibres (I never put in less than 8) running from core to edge.... and if buying fibre modules for your switches - use Gbics.com or try some of the £10 ones from China - they seem to work fine - well better than fine actually.

[Katy]

What are you all using for your core switches? I'm still running a 1GB core & it's creeking a bit - Cost of buying 10gb switches is painful tho right now

 

HP 5406zl with 2 of the (20 x 1GB Copper/ 4 x 1Gb Fibre) modules, plus a wireless module, 24 port 1Gb fibre module and 8 port 10GbE module. Installed in 2012 and we added the 10GbE card in summer 2016. Main VMWare hosts are on 10GbE connection, main cabs have 10GbE uplink, everything else 1Gb.

[AlanD]

Sorry, I'm not familiar with the HP range. Do I understand you have used up all 6 slots in the HP switch? (I assume the "06" means 6 modules). And have you used up all the existing fibre and copper ports? I was partly being devil's advocate - but, also making the serious point that if there is a problem somewhere with "speed" - you need to understand what that restriction is (if indeed it is the problem) - so you need to look at and monitor network traffic. While you may have 10G connections to your servers - are you using a SAN? And if so - what SAN switches do you have? Are they 10G too? Do you have a SAN capable of delivering multiple GB of data? Perhaps you do. Perhaps you have SSDs with hot and cold storage, or NVMe mirrored drives in your server boxes - in which case you probably are getting several GB of data into your core switch. Although I would still come back to created aggregated (Trunked) links from your core to edge switches before I started looking at replacing edge switches for 10GB ones....not least of all because it can be done for free - or nearly free.

 

Yes we do use some 10G links - but rarely are edge switches pushed above 1GB/s - mainly because our servers struggle to get the data out that quickly. BYOD - especially if you are feeding it with a 500MB/s leased line or something can consume network bandwidth of course. We use "cheap" netgear switches - bought second hand off Ebay a few years ago for £100 each - with 10G modules (another £25 off ebay ) plugged in. I'm not suggesting that everyone would want that kind of solution - but it is possible to provide performance on a shoe string. (We have a couple of spare netgear switches sitting on the shelf just in case the main ones fail - which at that price you can afford to do of course). And yes....the fans are irritatingly noisy in netgear equipment.

[Katy]

Sorry, I'm not familiar with the HP range. Do I understand you have used up all 6 slots in the HP switch? (I assume the "06" means 6 modules).

I'm not the OP, I was replying to "What do you use?", we are using 5 of the 6 slots and don't have any speed related problems on our network.

 

Edit: We went 10GbE because the fibre that was installed was only 4 core (against my wishes but was out of my hands at the time) so biggest aggregated link we could do to a cab was 2 x 1Gbps.

Also our SAN has 2 x 8Gb fibre channel into each VM host so it's quite fast.

Edited March 6, 2017 by Katy