Personal Project 10Gbps Storage Server & Quick Emulex Unboxing Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
1,314 words · ~6 min read
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all right guys it's not often I get this excited about something that comes in a
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plain brown box and doesn't save Republic of Gamers all over it but this
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is the oce 11102 NX this is a direct
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attach Copper 10 gbit per second Ethernet adapter so it has SFP plus
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connectors on it two ports PCI Express
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4X I believe comes with a some stuff inside okay so what's special about
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these These are the least expensive 10 GB per second capable adapters that are
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out there well lonus why would you care about that because you know 10 GB per
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second switches are Uber expensive comes with a lowprofile adapter comes with two
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low profile adapters I think one of these ended up I I have a few of them so
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and one of them didn't have one so I think they just come with one um so yeah
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10 GB per second switches are so expensive lonus why could it even matter
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to me the consumer that I can get a 10 gbit Ethernet card for under 300 bucks
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well the answer I would reply is daisy
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chaining these adapters and there are other ones too I actually got the wrong
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ones I didn't want the SFP plus ones it was my bad there's a different part
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number that can do 10 GB per second over cat 6 and Cat 6A which is just regular
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RJ 45 connect well sort of regular I
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think they've made some revisions but the point is much less expensive than
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directed attach copper cables which will run anywhere from about 50 to a couple
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hundred bucks depending on the length but they can go up to 40 ft and uh right
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so there's cat 6 cat 6A ones there's these SFP plus ones why am I excited
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about this because daisy chaining so they have two ports on them which means
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if you wanted to have sort of a a here I drew a little diagram where's my little
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diagram ah yes this is my plan that I've been working on for a while
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so this is my server with the quad gig
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Nick okay so server right there and then it's sort of one GB out to everywhere
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else from there then that server could also have one of these bad boys that I
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then run regular cat 6 to two other computers a capture computer and a video
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editing computer so I'm going to show you guys why this is so exciting in just
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a moment sorry guys baby's sleeping but
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uh here's the config I'm using just for testing so there's one of the MX cards
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and I've got a direct attach copper cable running down to another mux card
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so that's a 10 gbit Nick here and that's my quad 1 GB Nick here so this machine
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right here will have to have some network configuration done to allow this
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network to talk to this network so that
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these computers can all talk to this at one gig and these computers can talk to
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these ones at one gig but that all the daisy chain 10 gig computers will be
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able to do that now if you had a switch that would be better any switch with an
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SFP Plus sorry about that any switch with an SFP plus uh set of connectors on
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it will work for direct attached copper as far as I can tell although I could be
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wrong about that one but uh here we go
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so guys right now everything's pretty ghetto I just have the two cards
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directly attached to each other so you can see it's working here 10 gabit per
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second uh if we go ahead and look at the
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status of the connection there it is 10 gbit per second no internet access cuz
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like I said they're just direct attached but check this out okay so why do I need
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this couple things number one here check
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this out Uber file. mov this is a 5 minute media file that is 36 gigs for
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video work you want to work with uncompressed whenever you can which
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means I want to capture uncompressed from the camera to my black magic card
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then I want to work with that uncompressed footage and that is very
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very bandwidth intensive we've tried to do it on gigabit it's not even close so
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check this out I can play this file back over the network no big
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deal so there it's me talking about
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something let me just move this off to the side I want you guys to see this
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network usage you can see here that single gigabit would not have been
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anywhere near enough this needs at Peak like if I'm scrubbing through the file
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it's going to go up around 40% utilization on a 10 gabit per second
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connection all right so the other thing about 10 gig is that you have to have
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the horses on the other side to take advantage of it so my storage server
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here with the Orica raid card whoops yeah you guys can't see that with the
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Orica raid card has eight Seagate 3 tbte
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drives in those bottom eight Bays so they are capable of producing up to 700
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megabytes per second sustained reads and 500 megabytes per second sustained
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rights that's way more than gigabit gigabits only about 100 megabytes per
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second uh reads and wres
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so right so yes so the 10 GB per second connection wouldn't do me any good
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unless the storage on the other side was good enough to keep up with it so here
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I'm going to do a quick demo where I'm going to take a few video files let's
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say totaling about I don't know let's go
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for let's go for around five gigs here guys what do we got here yeah there we
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go 5.35 gigs and we're going to copy
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these to the desktop here check this out
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you guys are going to love this so you can see here it Peaks around 1.2 gab per
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second which is freaking unreal and then we start to be limited not by the this
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guy on the other side here cuz that was all like caching and memory and all that
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but we're limited actually by the right speeds of the SSD in the rendering
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machine which is here so guys what's exciting about this is that for about so
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each card is about 280 bucks on NC for these ulex cards whether you get the
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direct attach copper ones or the cat 6 cat 6 a ones which means you can build a
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three computer gabit 10 GB daisy chain
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for like 750 bucks plus cables so less than 1,000 bucks you can get these kinds
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of speeds now for a general consumer watching your Blu-ray rips yeah not that
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useful but if you don't want to spend several thousand on a switch invest in
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you know $700 cards plus you know $800 $700 SFP
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plus fiber modules blah blah blah and spend you know5 to 10 grand setting up a
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10 gbit per second connection if you have a use for one whether it's for like
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pro suumer video editing or whatever else this is actually very attainable
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thanks for checking out this episode of lonus tech tips about my 10 gabit per
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second connection experiment and don't forget to subscribe for more videos like
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this from yours truly I screwed up my
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outro whatever subscribe