Maxx Digital Evo 4K 12TB

[Greg Leuenberger]

Agreed…I’m going to wait 6 months and see if there’s any CAT6 10GB switches appearing like Matt said…that seems to be the best solution going forward, PCIe isn’t going anywhere in a hurry so even if I buy new workstations a $1K 10GB card will be portable and useful for a number of years…and my current GB switch is going on 7 years so a 10GB switch will be a good long term investment.

I’ll keep lurking around here in the meantime : )

best,

Greg

Greg Leuenberger
CEO
Sabertooth Productions, Inc.
http://www.sabpro.com

[Greg Leuenberger]

Matt – have you guys taken a look at these switches yet?

https://www.aristanetworks.com/en/7100_Series_10GBASETSwitches

I’m not sure how ‘managed’ this switch is…or how much that even matters at 10GB. These are very similar in design to Sun hardware (Sun is a client of mine) – I noticed Andy Bechtolsheim is head of development (which makes sense, he designed a lot of the Sun hardware).

-Greg

Greg Leuenberger
CEO
Sabertooth Productions, Inc.
http://www.sabpro.com

[Simon Blackledge]

Great thread guys.

Bob, Are these Saturn drives you talk about the E Deskstar drives by Hitachi ?

I thought the Ultrastars were the Enterprise class disks..

these?

https://www.hitachigst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/2232622C3696936F8625747B0082266E/$file/Deskstar_E7K1000_DS.pdf

Cheers

s

[Bob Zelin]

Hi Simon-
this is turning out to be a great thread.
You are correct – I just compared the insanely long Hitachi part # that I use to the web site link that you put up. It’s all so confusing.
This is the Hitachi Model #, that does correspond to what you just posted –

HDE721010SLA330

Try memorizing that ! But those are the drives that I am currenty using, and the reliabilty has been fantastic.

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

Hi Greg –
you write –
Agreed…I’m going to wait 6 months and see if there’s any CAT6 10GB switches appearing like Matt said…that seems to be the best solution going forward, PCIe isn’t going anywhere in a hurry so even if I buy new workstations a $1K 10GB card will be portable and useful for a number of years…and my current GB switch is going on 7 years so a 10GB switch will be a good long term investment

REPLY –
Greg, you are preaching to the choir. I too have no interest in even trying expensive 8 port 10 Gig switches, that only can use CX4 15 meter max cabling. Belden has fully functional 10GX CAT 6a (not 6e) cabling all ready to go, that can handle 10 Gig ethernet a full 100 meters with normal RJ45 connectors. I’m just waiting for the CAT 6a switches and cards, which “allegedly” are just around the corner.
Once this happens, this will be another huge nail in the Fibre channel coffin.

Greg, you have been a fantastic contributor to this forum. I hope you just don’t lurk, and continue to participate here. Your presence is greatly appreciated.

Bob Zelin

[Matt Geier]

Greg,

Arista is familiar to me, and to Small Tree. It’s one of the vendors that has a 10Gb Cat6 Switch.

Brocade also has one and right now I cannot find the link, but I know one exists.

Most of the reason why we are finding 10Gb CAT6 viable yet, has to do with the heat that the phy’s generate, causing boards to have large heat sinks. That’s clearly a problem with a congested footprint space like a switch.

As these types of problems are engineered and reworked in the industry, you’ll start to see these become more commodity.

There are a lot of places already wired to run CAT6, and 10gb would be a matter of plugging in a cable 🙂

[Matt Geier]

Greg,

Binding a couple of ports and designating those ports to one or two users is a set up is common in Pro Res environments with the solutions Bob and I are talking about. You would do this because you want dedicated links and bandwidth to the server.

The reality is that Ethernet can be configured a multitude of ways certainly which is ultimately what makes it inexpensive, flexible, scalable, and a very robust solution base.

Matt G.

[Greg Leuenberger]

That makes sense, I read the CAT6 phys uses quite a bit more power..

I’d kind of like to see a pricing structure where you can unlock ports on the switch as you need them (like the Fiber switch vendors do). The vendors are striving for a lot of density but for boutique’s like mine 24 10GB ports are overkill…I could make due with half..and at $500/port it would be nice to have that option.

-Greg

Greg Leuenberger
CEO
Sabertooth Productions, Inc.
http://www.sabpro.com

[Simon Blackledge]

Great! Thanks Bob 🙂

Very confusing still as some say no. Deskstars are not Enterprise :-/ we Saturn. eh! head hurts..haha.

s

[Eric Hansen]

hey bob

i notice that the R380 has 2 external SAS ports. the thing i really like about the CalDigit RAID card is that you can connect directly to the 4 internal drives in a MacPro, connecting the RAID card’s internal port to the Infiniband cable in the Mac. ATTO has the R348 with internal and external ports. are the R380 and R348 the same card? and if so, can it connect the same way as the CalDigit?

CalDigit has a slightly different setup if you’re running Boot Camp. i’m not running Boot Camp, but i need to run WinXP in Parallels to access AE7 (i have an old Red Giant plug-in and running it in Windows is the only way to get multi-core speed on an Intel. the Mac version of the plug-in is PPC only). have you heard of any issues with the ATTO cards and Parallels?

thanks

e

Eric Hansen, The Audio Visual Plumber – http://www.avplumber.com