A few months back, I decided it would be fun to start playing with 10GigE. We are probably still 12-24 months away from it really becoming affordable in general, probably longer until it gets widespread for SOHO and longer until we see it at home...maybe sooner in the homes of people who bother to read here. 
Like all good projects, this one has gotten massively carried away. Thought I'd start a thread to document and discuss the journey.
Background
I run a "business" taking video and stills of youth sports - mostly soccer - and producing videos. Mostly short memory videos for players or teams, some training/education video for coaches, and individual highlight videos for HS players looking to get noticed by college coaches. "Business" is a rather loose term since I do it mostly because I love it and nobody has ever paid me enough money to be viable. In fact, most of my work is given away... The real basis for this "business" is to feed my love of tinkering with the two non-human loves of my life, computers and high-end cameras, in a way that won't disgust my wife and get my funds cut off. Can anybody else relate to that? I knew you could! Along the way both my wife and my youngest daughter have become accomplices in this by becoming quite accomplished photographers and videographers.
Before anyone chimes in with "you don't need 10GigE" - I already know that! But it is both interesting and within my means, so why not?
So what am I trying to achieve? First, I want to get all my storage away from my workspace. It makes noise, generates heat, requires fans and takes up space. That's generally no problem, but for the video work I need high-performance storage or the editing/rendering process is just painful. I've experimented with several SSD/raid-0 configurations, but I can't make them large enough to just store all my active projects on - and copying projects to/from the storage server is unacceptably slow - projects average about 150-300GB of source material. I either need a local, working raid array or a way to move projects between the storage server and the SSDs quickly. Even better would be a network fast enough to work with the files directly on the storage server (more on that later, but I need ~250-400MB/s reads from disk to get satisfactory performance).
Here's where it gets interesting. A few weeks ago, I was describing all this to a colleague at work, whining a bit that point-to-point 10GigE was possible but would be something of a PITA. GigE switches - especially 10Gbase-t - are still ridiculously expensive. The next day he told me "your switch is on its way"... So, in the next couple of days I will be the proud owner of a Juniper EX-2500FB switch, a collection of 10G fiber SFP+ plug-ins, a few 10G wire direct attach copper connectors, and two Intel X520-2 NICs.
So here we go...
Like all good projects, this one has gotten massively carried away. Thought I'd start a thread to document and discuss the journey.
Background
I run a "business" taking video and stills of youth sports - mostly soccer - and producing videos. Mostly short memory videos for players or teams, some training/education video for coaches, and individual highlight videos for HS players looking to get noticed by college coaches. "Business" is a rather loose term since I do it mostly because I love it and nobody has ever paid me enough money to be viable. In fact, most of my work is given away... The real basis for this "business" is to feed my love of tinkering with the two non-human loves of my life, computers and high-end cameras, in a way that won't disgust my wife and get my funds cut off. Can anybody else relate to that? I knew you could! Along the way both my wife and my youngest daughter have become accomplices in this by becoming quite accomplished photographers and videographers.
Before anyone chimes in with "you don't need 10GigE" - I already know that! But it is both interesting and within my means, so why not?
So what am I trying to achieve? First, I want to get all my storage away from my workspace. It makes noise, generates heat, requires fans and takes up space. That's generally no problem, but for the video work I need high-performance storage or the editing/rendering process is just painful. I've experimented with several SSD/raid-0 configurations, but I can't make them large enough to just store all my active projects on - and copying projects to/from the storage server is unacceptably slow - projects average about 150-300GB of source material. I either need a local, working raid array or a way to move projects between the storage server and the SSDs quickly. Even better would be a network fast enough to work with the files directly on the storage server (more on that later, but I need ~250-400MB/s reads from disk to get satisfactory performance).
Here's where it gets interesting. A few weeks ago, I was describing all this to a colleague at work, whining a bit that point-to-point 10GigE was possible but would be something of a PITA. GigE switches - especially 10Gbase-t - are still ridiculously expensive. The next day he told me "your switch is on its way"... So, in the next couple of days I will be the proud owner of a Juniper EX-2500FB switch, a collection of 10G fiber SFP+ plug-ins, a few 10G wire direct attach copper connectors, and two Intel X520-2 NICs.
So here we go...
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