good, cheap switches?

[Eray Ozkural]

On Saturday 11 May 2002 15:24, Andrew Leahy wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Recently, I've locked horns with the computer support people about what
> sort of a switch I should use in my 20-node beowulf cluster.  I'm looking
> for a 24-port 100Mbit switch, and they're pushing a Cisco 3350-24 switch
> (around $1900) apparently for the simple reason that that's the switch they
> use on the rest of the campus.  As I look at the product specification
> sheet, their switch is loaded with features a campus-wide network manager
> is bound to love, but would be useless on an isolated beowulf cluster. 
> Since cost is an issue here, I'm curious if anybody has any recommendations
> for a cheaper (unmanaged?) switch with a switching fabric of comparable
> quality.

I think you've already solved your problem. You don't need Cisco. You'd be 
paying your dollars to their marketing and advertising people instead of the 
engineering.

I had looked at performance comparisons of switches when we were to buy one 
and I ended up with a 3com switch (which wasn't the cheapest). You'd need 
something like that, don't trust what the companies themselves claim about 
the performance of the switches.

I would recommend the switch we bought, but since there should be new models 
around you would need to see the price/performance for yourself. Did you 
search the web for any performance study?

Regards,

-- 
Eray Ozkural (exa) <erayo at cs.bilkent.edu.tr>
Comp. Sci. Dept., Bilkent University, Ankara
www: http://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~erayo  Malfunction: http://mp3.com/ariza
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