[Gluster-users] about HA infrastructure for hypervisors

[Brian Candler]

On Thu, Jun 28, 2012 at 11:25:20AM +0200, Nicolas Sebrecht wrote:
> We excluded ethernet due to searches on the web. It appeared that
> ethernet has bad latency.

I read it on the web, it must be true :-)

As I said: don't use 10GE over CAT6/RJ45 (10Gbase-T). That does indeed have
poor latency.  As I understand it: in order to get such high data rates over
copper, it has to employ mechanisms similar to DSL lines, like interleaving,
which means 10G has comparable or even higher latency than 1G.  Switches
with all 10Gbase-T ports are expensive, only available from a couple of
vendors, and consume a lot of power.

However switches with SFP+ ports don't have these problems. For short reach
you can use SFP+ direct attach cables, and for long reach use fibre.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10-gigabit_Ethernet

I have been working with Intel X520-DA2 NICs and a Netgear XSM7224S switch,
and direct-attach cables (3m Netgear AXC763, 5m Intel)

This all works fine, although with older versions of Linux I had to build
the latest Intel drivers from their website to fix problems with the links
going down every day or two.

Regards,

Brian.