Hi friends!
I haven’t written in a while. I’ve been caught up in work. But between working, I’ve put together some new equipment in a couple of new racks. I bought an audio dampened 15U rack a couple of years ago or so, and into it I’ve placed the RAID array and an HP desktop form-factor ML110 server to drive the disks. The disk array controller is a two-port Broadcom / LSI SAS3008 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS-3. I’ve been thinking about getting the four-port variant, since I like this one and I’ve got another 7 drive bays in the chassis that don’t have disks in them.
In the next rack over, which was gifted to me by one of my colleagues (Thank you Nahuel!), I have six qotom mini computers and a couple of 48-port Dell 6248 switches with two 6200-XGSF 10GE SFP+ modules. The mini computers are a sort of proto-cluster, and all have a whole bunch of network interfaces. The smallest of the group is a celeron with four gigabit ethernet ports, and the two fastest ones have i7 processors with 6x GE ports. Each of the mini computers is configured with all of their ethernet interfaces in a single LACP port-channel, thanks to the bonding Linux kernel module.
On my desk, I have a Mikrotik CRS305. It is populated with three LR SMF transceivers. One attaches to my work desktop via a QLogic Corp. cLOM8214 PCIe card, one attaches via a thunderbolt 3 NIC to my work laptop, and the other is connected to the aforementioned Dell switch.
My internet provider has installed a Optical Network Transceiver (ONT) device in my home which terminates the incoming Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON) services from the CO and delivers 940Mbit symmetric PPP over Ethernet via 8-pin copper out of the ONT. I connect the ONT to a Mikrotik CRS309-1G-8S+ router. That router is connected via LR SMF to the dell switch in the rack full of qotom hardware.
This afternoon, I tested the throughput between my work desktop and my storage server and came up with these numbers:
$ iperf -c 100.64.79.102 ------------------------------------------------------------ Client connecting to 100.64.79.102, TCP port 5001 TCP window size: 16.0 KByte (default) ------------------------------------------------------------ [ 1] local 100.64.79.46 port 55216 connected with 100.64.79.102 port 5001 (icwnd/mss/irtt=14/1448/547) [ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth [ 1] 0.0000-10.0129 sec 10.4 GBytes 8.95 Gbits/sec
That seems pretty good to me! The traffic hopped through my desk router and the dell switch to get to the Proliant server, and still nearly reached 9Gbit/s. That’s a lot of blinkenlights.