This is not a humble brag post - I am genuinely curious if I am missing something. It's been a few weeks since I upgraded my home network to 40Gbps. So far it has been running smoothly and the upgrade process was pretty painless and significantly less expensive comparing to the 1Gbps to 10Gbps upgrade I went through about 3 years ago.
My home network consists of 2 workstations and half a dozen servers in 2 adjacent rooms in the basement and about 30 some odd "slow" devices throughout the rest of the house. All my "high speed" devices are located in close proximity from each other - so using SFP+ adapters with DAC cables was the obvious choice. My main switch progression went "naturally" from "48x 1G" to "48x 1G + 1x 10G" to "48x 1G + 2x 10G" to "48x 1G + 4x 10G" to finally "48x 1G + 8x 10G" over the course of 2+ years. Which was not the greatest idea from the financial point of view. I also replaced some adapters as well. All in all I spent close to $1500 on 10GbE related gear (switches/adapters/cables/etc). Had I skipped some intermediate upgrades I would still have come just under a $1000.
I was expecting the next step up to be even more expensive. And I was very surprised to find out how affordable the 40GbE hardware is. I have spent less than $400 on a 12-port 40GbE switch + 12 ConnectX-3 cards + 12 QDR cables of various lengths + 1 FDR cable (just to confirm that the whole setup is 56GbE capable). The only thing I did differently this time around was using separate switches for my "slow" and "fast" networks which are now connected via a single 10G link.
I think I am going to sell my ICX7250-48 (which oddly is selling higher now than when I got it) and replace it with some old 48-port POE switch with a single 10G uplink.
My home network consists of 2 workstations and half a dozen servers in 2 adjacent rooms in the basement and about 30 some odd "slow" devices throughout the rest of the house. All my "high speed" devices are located in close proximity from each other - so using SFP+ adapters with DAC cables was the obvious choice. My main switch progression went "naturally" from "48x 1G" to "48x 1G + 1x 10G" to "48x 1G + 2x 10G" to "48x 1G + 4x 10G" to finally "48x 1G + 8x 10G" over the course of 2+ years. Which was not the greatest idea from the financial point of view. I also replaced some adapters as well. All in all I spent close to $1500 on 10GbE related gear (switches/adapters/cables/etc). Had I skipped some intermediate upgrades I would still have come just under a $1000.
I was expecting the next step up to be even more expensive. And I was very surprised to find out how affordable the 40GbE hardware is. I have spent less than $400 on a 12-port 40GbE switch + 12 ConnectX-3 cards + 12 QDR cables of various lengths + 1 FDR cable (just to confirm that the whole setup is 56GbE capable). The only thing I did differently this time around was using separate switches for my "slow" and "fast" networks which are now connected via a single 10G link.
I think I am going to sell my ICX7250-48 (which oddly is selling higher now than when I got it) and replace it with some old 48-port POE switch with a single 10G uplink.