ebay deal: Netgear ProSafe XSM7224S

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PigLover

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Jan 26, 2011
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Noted from another thread: Netgear ProSafe XSM7224S Layer 3 Switch

Comments from mkrad:

It's L2+ but you can buy an L3 license, but it's kind of crazy to use a cut-through switch to route.

IF someone is going to bid on it, post here, so we don't bid against each other. It will sell for $1000.

From what I've googled its identical to the powerconnect 8024F except it has a cavium octeon cn5230 control plane cpu, 512meg of sodimm ecc, and 128meg apacer slc compact flash. The Dell is running the same basic firmware except it has progressed far beyond where netgear has taken it.

Before you get wise , the cpu is completely different, and you will fry it if you try to cross flash - the control plane uses a broadcom out of the box design that ran run on mips64/arm/x86/powerpc and the dataplane is basically the same BCM56820 .

So its a gimped out L2 10gbe switch that is great for TOR 10gbe only compared to the powerconnect 8024f. Cut-through kind of makes it hard to do 1gbe/10gbe mixing but hey 10gbe nic's are a dime a dozen.

It's not mine, and I can't comment on price since its far below what I'd pay for it(demo price is way more than this), but I do happen to have press review demo on loan right now to play with.

That being said for a grand, you will find nothing on the planet that comes near that price. $3000 used is where the powerconnect 8024f/juniper ex2500 sit around. Odd thing is that netgears chassis switch are extreme 8800's. Makes you wonder where this came from.

Either way it would be silly to bid against each other
 
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PigLover

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@mkrad: How's the fan noise on it? I have the Juniper ex2500 in my rack and its the noisiest thing in the whole rack (well, it was until I installed the HP DL180). It also draws like 120watts with about 15 SFP+ DAC cables plugged in - no optics, just DAC.

I'm not even close to pressing the envelope on throughput or PPS. Its more of a toy and for infrequent data transfer bursts. If you can tell me that this Netgear switch is quieter and/or draws less power than the ex2500 then I'm in at $1,000 and will sell the Juniper for at least double that.
 
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PigLover

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One other question. Its a longshot, but... Since its built with the BCM56820 and uses a Octeon control plane it seems purpose-built for Openflow. Do you know if Netgear's software exposes openflow?
 
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mrkrad

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I cannot find reference to the cn5230 octeon processor being used in any other product for control plane along with the broadcom BCM56820 switch data plane so I would say negatory unless you have access to the sdk.
 
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mrkrad

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p.s. the problem are the 10gbase-T - they contain massive heatsinks to the PHY. But you can alter the cooling as you wish since the fans are hot swap and its a regular delta dps 300 power supply. Odd that it blows the air out the back and there is no goop on the cpu/npu. I would think you could employ water cooling to reduce the temps for the cavium and broadcom with ease and avoid the fan noise from the 1 or 2 delta power suppliers and the dual fan hot-swap trays. It's really a simple design. I suspect it will run hotter with 4 10gbase-T ports given the wattage necessary to run the PHY's.


Go download the firmware for the switch, unlike the other cpu's - it is not encrypted. The cpu is too old to have the newer octeon anti-tamper encryption built in. It appears this cpu is also used for some NAS products.
 
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PigLover

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mrkrad said:
...It appears this cpu is also used for some NAS products.
Click to expand...
Its this part that intrigues me regarding the CPU. Other Netgear products with the same CPU the "-200NAS" part number as the Openflow software variants. The XSM7224S comes in a -100NAS variant but I don't know if that's just a software difference or something more fundamental.

I've got some openflow projects in the hopper and it could be a very interesting to have a 10Gbe platform to add to the lab.
 
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mrkrad

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Interesting that all the cheap switches use the same broadcom chipset but different cpu's. I suspect if you can speak chinese you'd get a bit for information out of netgear but that being said I would seriously doubt the firmware is as good as the juniper you have.

Have you opened that thing up? It's seriously a cpu/npu/and PHY - you could watercool all of that for less than $100 and have a dead silent ex2500. (juniper outsourced the ex2500 to some chinese company like dell powerconnect 8024 and this switch lol).

All just CPU du jour with broadcom SDK.

Honestly I can't see why these aren't RETAIL $1000, there is nothing on them that is worth the price folks charge $10K for a simple TOR switch. Maybe its all the software??
 
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