[Beowulf] Gigabit switch recommendations

[Joshua Baker-LePain]

On Thu, 30 Mar 2006 at 9:04am, Tim Mattox wrote

> IMNSHO, Marketing Departments should be jailed... or at least not
> allowed to do the "technical specs" pages for networking products.
> And at a minimum, they need to be flogged with a wet noodle... :-)

After spending the last several days digging through said materials, a wet 
noodle is decidedly *not* what I had in mind as the flogging implement.

> FYI - here are some links to a variety of 48-port commodity GigE switches,
> that may be worth looking at (but as another poster indicated, these
> might actually all be the same switch built by an OEM and just rebadged.
> One can only really tell by opening one up and looking at the PCB and chips
> that are inside.):
>
> SMC8648T TigerSwitch
> http://www.smc.com/index.cfm?event=viewProductDetail&localeCode=EN_USA&pid=1192

The SMC8748L2 I went with is here:

http://www.smc.com/index.cfm?event=viewProduct&localeCode=EN_USA&pid=1498

It's cheaper than the 8648T while apparently newer and with some "better" 
specs.  As I mentioned before, I'm decidedly skeptical and intend to test 
it hard while I'm still well within the return period.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University