10-GigE for servers

[nathan at robotics.net (Nathan Stratton)]

On Fri, 1 May 2009, Jason Shoemaker wrote:

> My company is looking for ways to improve throughput for data transfers
> between individual servers.  We?re exploring the creation of Etherchannels
> using multiple server NICs, but Etherchannel seems to have the limitation of
> not supporting per-packet load-balancing, therefore limiting traffic between
> two individual hosts to 1 Gig.

Have you thought about Infiniband? Dual 10 gig cards cost about $50 and 24 
port switches about $1200 on ebay. Infiniband has just a fraction of the 
latency of ethernet (even 10 get eth). You get the lowest latency if your 
application supports Infiniband, but if not you can run IP over IB.


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Nathan Stratton                                CTO, BlinkMind, Inc.
nathan at robotics.net                         nathan at blinkmind.com
http://www.robotics.net                        http://www.blinkmind.com