need help about 40G

Sun Sep 30 13:48:12 UTC 2012

Hi Deric, 

On the part of 40G, there is a clear financial benefit instead of moving
currently towards 100G.  If you don't need 100G yet, there is a lot of money
to be saved by skipping first generation 100G.  40G ports will only set you
back around 1500 US$ per port. Optics are also quite cheap and because of
that, it is a nice solution. 

As already mentioned by Adam in his reply. Extreme Networks has a device
(the BD X8) that can fit 192 - 40G ports in 14.5U (or 1/3) rack space. These
can also be used as 768 10G ports, if you split the 40G into 4*10G.  Which
you can by just putting other cabling to the optic.  

If you don't require such a large quantity of ports, there are also smaller
(1U switches) with have 4*40G option boards, like the X670V from Extreme. 
These boxes are not expensive, stable and provide a great price to port
density ratio.  Also something which is very interesting, these boxes have
both a very low latency, which makes them ideal for storage, cloud and
trading scenarios. There are some tests reports you can find online if you
are not only looking for 40G but specifically in combination with very low
latency. 

I personally haven't used the Mellanox 40G nics yet, but I have been told
that these have been tested by other customers and work like a charm with
the Extreme kit.  

If you have more specific questions, please let me know (can also off-list).

Regards,
Erik Bais 