[Bioclusters] Suggestions on selecting network switch for biocomputing clusters.

[Chris Dagdigian]

Hi Luobin,

You have lots of options at different price points. 24 port unmanged Gig 
switches are pretty darn cheap these days. Managed switches pretty 
inexpensive these days as well.

You may want to look at a ~48 port switch because with 24 nodes in your 
cluster you are not leaving yourself *any* extra ports for things like 
fileservers, management nodes or trunked gigabit connections.

Cisco Catalyst 35xx series switches and gear from Extreme Networks have 
never given me problems.

I really like the Dell Powerconnect product line from a 
features-per-price perspective. One of their units (maybe the 5024) gave 
me real trouble a few years ago on one project but since then things 
have been OK. The Dell stuff tends to have good pricing.

A new favorite of ours is the HP Procurve 2800 series, especially the 
Procurve 2848.

We also have some SMC gigE switches inhouse that have never given us 
problems. The managed versions are part of the "TigerStack" line and the 
unmanaged "home" switches are called "EZ Connect".

-Chris