I have more hosts than I can easily string together with ad hoc connections. I’ve been thinking about getting the Unifi XG-16, but then I saw the 20 port Fugitsu XG2000R. When they came out in 2006 they were $18,000, but now they’re $180. The Unifi switch is more power efficient, but I think I can run this for 3-4 years before I make up the price difference. And that is assuming worst case senario where this draws 100w more.
I case you’re wondering XFP is fiber only, no DAC option. As long as the modules are the same wave length, i.e. 850mn, they have no problems talking to SFP+. I picked up 10 of the XFP modules for $41, so I can’t really complain about the cost.
I think I’m going to start by just using this switch for my storage network. A new ISP to the area is supposed to start installing fiber this spring. Maybe after I have fiber I might try doing some fiber runs in the house, we’ll see.
Cool, good to know that XFP can talk to SFP+ for future reference. I recently began converting parts of my network to 10Gb (one of those ad hoc connections you spoke of). It seems to be okay for now, but in the future I would like to avoid the complexity of having multiple routes to a single server and instead have everything connected through a 10Gb switch.
I’ve been running the switch for a few days now. Some things were easier than I thought and others were harder. The nice thing is user manual has great documentation!
The command line is pretty straight forward. I have 8 ports populated and I think it’s drawing 90-100w, at least that’s about what the usage of my rack jumped by after installation.
Now I just need to find time to get my last server hooked up so that all the servers have access to storage over 10G. I think I’ll wait to hook the switch up to my router until there is a use case, i.e. faster then 1G internet, but I’m sure that’ll be a few years.