Guidance/suggestions for small (6-12 port) gigabit switches and gigabit NICs?

[Douglas Eadline]

On Thu, 4 Sep 2003, Donald Becker wrote:

> On Thu, 4 Sep 2003, Jeffrey B. Layton wrote:
> 
> >  SMC recently announced a low-cost 8 port GigE switch that can handle
> > jumbo frames.
> > 
> > http://www.smc.com/index.cfm?sec=About-SMC&pg=Press-Release-Details&pr_id=129&site=c 
> 
> That's very aggressive pricing for a switch with jumbo frame support.
> 
> The previous lowest-cost GbE switches have a street price of $160 for 8
> ports, but the per-port price goes up dramatically for larger switches.
> 
> > They also announced GigE NICs for $30. I don't know about Linux
> > support. If not, here's a website that some some decent information
> > about copper GigE:
> 
> My guess is that they are using Realtek rtl8169 chips.  The rtl8169 is
> not as sophisticated as the e1000, but is still a reasonable performer.
> It's a much better design than the justly-maligned rtl8139.

Based on what I read at:                                                                                 

http://www.cs.uni.edu/~gray/gig-over-copper/

(note: read the paper 
http://www.cs.uni.edu/~gray/gig-over-copper/hsln-lcn.ps)

I purchased two Netgear 302T nics for about $30 each. They are 32 bit
cards that will run at 66 Mhz, have a Broadcom chipset, and use
the tg3 driver. Here as some _preliminary_ results using netpipe(tcp)  

PCI Speed         Latency       Max Throughput
 33                 28             700 Mbits/sec (87.5 Mbytes/sec)
 66                 30             840 Mbits/sec (105 Mbytes/sec)
                                                                                
The tests were done in dual PIII-1.266 Serverworks LE (Supermicro P3TDLE)
using the kernel 2.40.20, 1500 byte MTU (they support Jumbos, however)
While not as sexy as a PCI-X 64 bit card, at $30 a card, the performance
is pretty good.

Doug



Doug

> 
> 

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