10 gigabit link at home?

Good day to all geeks and difficult people with strange requests. I hope there are people here who are not satisfied with the speed in gigabits and dream of speeds of 10 gigabits, or even 100. At the moment, there are already quite cheap solutions in the form of pci-e network cards with two ports of the sfp + form factor, which can be connected cheap twinax cable.

Under the cut there are small reflections on a 10 Gigabit thunderbolt from Intel, a description of a dual-port network card from Intel and a twinax cable, screenshots from freebsd, linux, windows and a lot of photos.

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Not so long ago, engadget began to stir up my brain with the thunderbolt interface , which should appear in new macbooks and shows videos at speeds of 600-800 megabytes per second with NAS Pegasus from PROMISE . Promise promised to release its NAS for sale in the apple store in the second quarter of this year, and apparently this would be the first device with the thunderbolt interface, but alas, I could not find it on sale. Intel promises that the interface will be cheap and homely, with a small cable length if the cable is copper and a large long cable if optical, speeds of up to 10 gigabits, as well as a shared environment (remembering peer-to-peer coaxial networks). But alas, there are no devices, no one has named the prices either, and I already want 10 gigabits now.

A couple of years ago I considered 10g solutions and the prices there were at the level of 30k rubles per port + optics and other crap for the house is not particularly affordable. But now Intel has released a network card with two sfp + ports with support for speed of 10g worth 9-10k rubles (Intel X520 DA2 10GbE Dual Port SFP +) , cards can be connected with a cheap twinax cable from Dell cost 2-3k rubles (5M SFP + Direct Attach Twinaxial Cable).

The Intel X520 DA2 network card is designed for virtualization systems, so it has two ports. One is used to communicate with the global network, and the second is used to communicate with external storage via iscsi or fcoe where images of virtual machines are stored, but no one forbids using it in channel consolidation and get a 20 gigabit link. You can insert sfp + modules with a 10g optical interface (expensive) or a twinax cable (cheap) into the card. How the cable is connected to the card can be seen in the photos below the article.

I decided to buy three cards and three cables to connect three servers in a 10 gigabit ring, the servers have different operating systems, at the moment I only tested the speed between freenas and windows? I got 300 megabytes between them, the 5th software raid of 5 hard drives was assembled on Windows, and the zfs raidz2 frissa of 20 screws. I think that everything depends on the Windows raid later I will carry out tests with Linux and I think I can get almost 10 gigabits of speed between the storages. The cost of this whole business is 9500 * 3 + 2500 * 3 = 36,000 rubles.

For this case, you can still purchase a switch, but I haven’t yet found models cheaper than 100,000, well, I think those are just around the corner.

This is what the freenas network card looks like:

freenas # ifconfig
ix0: flags = 8943 <UP, BROADCAST, RUNNING, PROMISC, SIMPLEX, MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
options = 1bb <RXCSUM, TXCSUM, VLAN_MTU, VLAN_HWTAGGING, JUMBO_MTU, VLAN_HWCSUM, TSO4>
ether 00: 1b: 21: a3: 94: 7c
media: Ethernet autoselect
status: no carrier
ix1: flags = 8943 <UP, BROADCAST, RUNNING, PROMISC, SIMPLEX, MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
options = 1bb <RXCSUM, TXCSUM, VLAN_MTU, VLAN_HWTAGGING, JUMBO_MTU, VLAN_HWCSUM, TSO4>
ether 00: 1b: 21: a3: 94: 7d
media: Ethernet autoselect (10Gbase-Twinax <full-duplex>)
status: active

So in linux ubuntu:

root @ ubuntu: ~ # ifconfig

eth2 Link encap: Ethernet HWaddr 00: 1b: 21: a3: c3: 6c
inet addr: 192.168.20.5 Bcast: 192.168.20.255 Mask: 255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80 :: 21b: 21ff: fea3: c36c / 64 Scope: Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU: 1500 Metric: 1
RX packets: 22946932 errors: 0 dropped: 0 overruns: 0 frame: 0
TX packets: 4925414 errors: 0 dropped: 0 overruns: 0 carrier: 0
collisions: 0 txqueuelen: 1000
RX bytes: 1554581575 (1.5 GB) TX bytes: 975549697 (975.5 MB)

eth3 Link encap: Ethernet HWaddr 00: 1b: 21: a3: c3: 6d
UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU: 1500 Metric: 1
RX packets: 0 errors: 0 dropped: 0 overruns: 0 frame: 0
TX packets: 0 errors: 0 dropped: 0 overruns: 0 carrier: 0
collisions: 0 txqueuelen: 1000
RX bytes: 0 (0.0 B) TX bytes: 0 (0.0 B)

root @ ubuntu: ~ # ethtool eth2
Settings for eth2:
Supported ports: [FIBRE]
Supported link modes: 10000baseT / Full
Supports auto-negotiation: No
Advertised link modes: 10000baseT / Full
Advertised pause frame use: No
Advertised auto-negotiation: No
Speed: 10000Mb / s
Duplex: Full
Port: Direct Attach Copper
PHYAD: 0
Transceiver: external
Auto-negotiation: off
Supports Wake-on: d
Wake-on: d
Current message level: 0x00000007 (7)
Link detected: yes

root @ ubuntu: ~ # ethtool eth3
Settings for eth3:
Supported ports: [FIBRE]
Supported link modes: 10000baseT / Full
Supports auto-negotiation: No
Advertised link modes: 10000baseT / Full
Advertised pause frame use: No
Advertised auto-negotiation: No
Speed: Unknown!
Duplex: Unknown! (255)
Port: Direct Attach Copper
PHYAD: 0
Transceiver: external
Auto-negotiation: off
Supports Wake-on: d
Wake-on: d
Current message level: 0x00000007 (7)
Link detected: no

Like this in windows:

Questions, suggestions, suggestions?
All who do not mind throwing money for food:
Yandex money: 41001350134938
wmr: R216907812321
wmz: Z115984864021

I will donate a good camera, high-tech hardware for reviews, interesting things (offer it yourself), a topic for review or lighting.

We do not regret karma and advantages.

UPD1: At the request in the comments I attach a screen copying from the total (the speed will be higher in the tests on Linux).