[Gluster-users] Switch recommendations

[Dan Bretherton]

Dear All,
I need to buy a bigger GigE switch for my GlusterFS cluster and I am 
trying to decide whether or not a much more expensive one would be 
justified.  I have limited experience with networking so I don't know if 
it would be appropriate to spend £500, £1500 or £3500 for a 48-port 
switch.  Those rough costs are based on a comparison of 3 Dell 
Powerconnect switches: the 5548 (bigger version of what we have now), 
the 6248 and the 7048.  The servers in the cluster are nothing special - 
mostly Supermicro with SATA drives and 1GigE network adapters.  I can 
only justify spending more than ~£500 if I can be sure that users would 
notice the difference.  Some of the users' applications do lots of small 
reads and writes, and they do run much more slowly if all the servers 
are not connected to the same switch, as is the case now while I don't 
have a big enough switch.  Any advice or comments would be much appreciated.

Regards
Dan.