Get the latest tech news

Sysadmin friendly high speed Ethernet switching

I’ve been on the lookout for a ethernet switch that I don’t hate, the problem with a lot of higher speed (10G and above) ethernet switches is that they are quite expensive new and if you buy the used then they rarely have many years left ( or none at all ) of software patches. A lot of the low end market for ethernet switches also have infamously bad software and one of the things that annoys me the most about the networking industry as a whole is that a lot of the cheap equipment has no real way of doing software support yourself.

The massive benefit of this is that the drivers (mlxsw) for the Mellanox chip are open to people who don’t want to pay large volumes of money for a SDK, unlike the broadcom counterparts. One thing of note while we have the lid open, Inside of the switch is a mystery QSFP connector with no cage, I’m unsure what it is used for, but I’m not willing to risk sticking an optic in it and find out! However I do worry that Nvidia will fall down a similar path to the late Nortel at this point due to their meteoric rise in an industry that could easily be a bubble.

Get the Android app