[Kevin OBrien]

The Mellanox SX1036 is a 1U managed Ethernet switch that provides up to 2.88Tb/s of non-blocking throughput via 36 40Gb/s QSFP ports that can be broken out to achieve up to 64 10Gb/s ports or offer a mixture of 40Gb/s and 10Gb/s connectivity. As a backbone to the StorageReview Enterprise Lab networking infrastructure, the SX1036 switch provides the connectivity required to test the latest Ethernet-based high-speed network storage appliances. On the compute side, we’re pairing the SX1036 with Mellanox’s dual-port 10GbE and 40GbE ConnectX-3 EN PCIe 3.0 Ethernet adapters and connecting with Mellanox QSFP and SFP+ cables, giving our lab a complete end-to-end Mellanox interconnect solution.

Mellanox SX1036 10/40Gb Ethernet Switch Review

[Darking]

I havnt really had the chance to play around with infiniband.. do you use zoning as you do with fiberchannel switches, or do they work more like normal routeable switches?

[Kevin OBrien]

It works a lot like a standard routable switch. We actually have it meshing with our building infrastructure for device domain access depending on subnet.

[continuum]

Were there going to be any performance benchmarks, or is that impractical with the equipment available?

[Kevin OBrien]

We will be doing multiple follow up pieces where the performance aspects of items in our lab are brought up in reviews using the equipment. The first items coming out utilize the 10Gbs interface, with a JetStor SAN review and then a HP HA-NAS. We feel that addressing performance in reviews with this equipment makes more sense, using the main review piece as an overview, since we can dive into finer detail nuances in each reviews moreso than what we could in just the review of the switch itself.

[kristofferjon]

Kevin OBrien, on 06 September 2012 - 07:59 AM, said:

We will be doing multiple follow up pieces where the performance aspects of items in our lab are brought up in reviews using the equipment. The first items coming out utilize the 10Gbs interface, with a JetStor SAN review and then a HP HA-NAS. We feel that addressing performance in reviews with this equipment makes more sense, using the main review piece as an overview, since we can dive into finer detail nuances in each reviews moreso than what we could in just the review of the switch itself.

Hi Kevin,

Nice review. Would there be any chance of a follow up article covering the following:

• Benchmarking of CIFS, NFS and ISCSI storage performance over 40G
  
• Netperf and Iperf test results under Linux, Windows and Solaris
  
• Testing of latency under real world conditions
  
• Discussion of Layer-3 40G routing as a plug in module to Mellanox's recently open-sourced, Linux based network OS
  
• Additional coverage for manageability aspects of the switches

Regards, Kris.