Spending money - thoughts please

[Mrs Fish]

James speaking:

Right jsut tarted the server room up a bit with new cab etc.

Want to get rid of the old doemstic 16 port netgear switchs and replace with a nice 48 port rackmount for the cabinant.

So far two have shone (cost is an issue)

1) a 48 port unmanaged netgear with one gigabit port (takes up 2u though)

2) a 3 COM 48 port with 2x 1 gigabit uplinks (only takes up 1u)

I'm currently earing towards the 3 COM unless anyone has any other thoughts.

It also means I can get a gigabit card for the server although this wont make much difference till I make the hard drive faster as it is only a 7,200rpm ATA 133 IDE drive. Or would I be better getting anything else to make it faster than the gigabit card?

Answers on a postcard please.

P.S. I don't want to spend more than £450.

[smeagol]

Well from a personal gateway (a massive 4 port network ) point of view I'm very impressed with 3com. Especially their customer support. I had a problem and they emailed possible solutions and when I sent screenshots they could confirm I had done everything right.

[agent006]

3COM. Without a doubt.
Have a scoot around ebay for some Cisco 3500s if you're ok with second hand stuff.

[ErnestM]

I run my whole office on 3Com kit and home/office/lan as well. Excellent stuff!

ErnestM

[sheepy]

James

Buy the 3Com gear I used to work for them, and wouldn't hesitate to buy their gear if I wanted networking kit. I was a H/W designer on the DSH500, and one of two guys who came up with the 3300XM/TM/SM/MM product (after a liquid lunch! ).

Sheepy

[fish]

Thanks I've gone for the 3COm will be arriving tommorrow with a Gigabit server card for the server. All I've got to do now is get the server to keep up with the network!!

[robertuk]

Hi,

You could make the hard driver faster by setting up a RAID system.

Basically get two identical hard drives and a RAID adapter (£<50) and then your hard disk performance
increases by quite a bit. Quite a few servers have similar setups.

Ramesh

[JamieBeeston]

a decent scsi raid setup will see you breach Gbit speeds easily. Gbit should suffice tho, its not like your going to be running at >100mB/sec constantly...

be lucky to see anywhere near that on a constant basis in a 'regular' network.


Tho I dont know specifically what you do.

Make sure you choose quality Gbit nics.. Intel are my card of choice for the datacentre. and some good Cat6 for cabling (or fibre if you want to get some distance and speed increase)

IDE isnt suited to large data speeds, given all the I/O is processed by the CPU, meaning the faster you transfer, the larger the load on the CPU. (So you either need to get an external IDE processer on a Card, or switch to SCSI) plus IDE doesnt natively hotswop, how much lower RPM, this slower seek times, and a much lower MTBF, so doesnt last as long & unless your talking SATA, can only support 2 devices per channel (15 on scsi)

SCSI is there for a Reason