Compute and storage separate, need 10Gb switching?

rrbnc · Thu Dec 04, 2014 4:53 am

With a hyperconverged setup, I have used crossover cables between two 10Gb NICs. If I have compute and storage separated, do I need to add redundant 10Gb switching? Or can I still get by with crossover cables (2 compute nodes, 2 storage nodes)?

Fri Dec 05, 2014 4:36 pm

It depends (c) ...

You can absolutely run 10 GbE as a backbone connection between a pair of StarWind boxes feeding storage to your either Hyper-V or vSphere setup. Backbone would be 10 GbE and uplinks will go 1 GbE. We have quite a lot of customers doing like that. However if you want to go 10 GbE all-around you'll need to have switches (Force10 and surprisingly Netgears are fine) as fully-connected 4 node mesh would go with a crazy amount of NICs used very ineffectively.

rrbnc wrote:With a hyperconverged setup, I have used crossover cables between two 10Gb NICs. If I have compute and storage separated, do I need to add redundant 10Gb switching? Or can I still get by with crossover cables (2 compute nodes, 2 storage nodes)?