[Beowulf] Gigabit switch recommendations

Joshua Baker-LePain jlb17 at duke.edu
Tue Mar 28 07:14:53 PST 2006


My cluster and fileservers are moving to a new home shortly, and I'm going to 
take the opportunity to put them on a private network.  Given everything is 
gigabit and there's a lot of NFS going on, I'd like to use jumbo frames.  I 
currently have 33 systems, and I'm not likely to grow by any huge amount (he 
says with uncharacteristic optimism).  So I'm mainly looking at getting a 
couple of 24 port switches.

Given past research, I was about to go with the Dell 5324, but then I came upon 
the much cheaper 2724.  The main differences for my purposes seem minor (9018 
byte vs. 9000 byte jumbo frame support, 8 member ports per aggregrated link vs. 
4).  Is there any compelling reason to go with the 5324 over the 2724?  Does 
anyone have another recommendation in the same general price range?

Thanks.

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



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