[Click] [OT] - Any suggestions on what hardware to buy?

[Roman Chertov]

Nicholas Weaver wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 21, 2006 at 12:21:42PM -0400, Roman Chertov composed:
> 
>>Alastair McKinley wrote:
>>
>>>Hi everyone,
>>>
>>>Apologies for the slightly off topic question.
>>>
>>>I want to run Click on a powerful machine with lots of interfaces
>>>(10-50, the more the better), and I was hoping that someone here might
>>>have an idea what to look for.
>>>
>>>I guess I want e1000 NICS to support polling.  Can I buy such a beast
>>>off the shelf or should I build my own?  If I were to build it, what
>>>would I get to support enough e1000 NICS? 
>>
>>I know that you can buy multi-port Intel Pros (e1000).  So you can get 
>>by with fewer cards.  I think 4 is the maximum.  That would require you 
>>to have 10 PCI slots to get 40 ports.  I am not sure who builds such 
>>motherboards.  Also you want the motherboard to have PCI-E bus to allow 
>>for maximum throughput.  Ideally you would use a at least two processors
>>for this thing.  Although I think this all depends on what traffic you 
>>expect to deal with.  If you expect the traffic to be small then you can 
>>get buy with a lesser machine.
> 
> 
> One comment:  How much bandwidth do you expect to be pulling?

That is the key question here :)

> 
> It might be substantially cheaper & easier to have a 48 port managed
> ethernet switch, and use fixed VLAN configurations to concentrate it
> down to 8 Gigabit cards in the host.  Since there is no whay you'd be
> able to support high bandwidth for 10+ ports in software, you might as
> well have the switch handle the port multiplexing etc.

It might be possible to use a managed switch to just route the traffic 
to a few cheaper machines and distribute the whole thing.

Roman

> 
> 
> 
> 
>>>Should I be looking to run multi-threaded Click on SMP?
>>
>>You need SMP to get the full benefits of multi-threaded click.
>>
>>Roman
>>
>>
>>>Again, apologies for the off-topic question.  
>>>
>>>Best regards,
>>>
>>>Alastair
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>>
>>
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>