Ark Technologies 32-port Nway Switch - Review

[dsr at tao.merseine.nu (dsr at tao.merseine.nu)]

On Thu, Jan 09, 2003 at 10:12:04AM -0500, kgleason.ma.ultranet at rcn.com wrote:
> I am looking seriously at purchasing the Ark Technologies 32-port 10/100
> Nway CT2232T Switch which is selling for $185 plus shipping for my Linux
> Beowulf cluster. I was wondering if anyone has had problems with this
> product in their business/organization? The price seems good but I wonder
> about the quality if others are selling well above this price. (I found
> this on PriceWatch.com.) 

Is there any information about the architecture of the switch?

In a cluster environment, especially, you need to be able to switch
every port at full speed to every other. It does no good to have a
32x100 Mb/s switch if the backplane is limited to 800Mb/s, for example.

Typically, that and management capabilities are the reasons for a switch
being substantially cheaper than a high-end Cisco or HP.

-dsr-

-- 
Network engineer looking for work in Boston area.
Resume at http://tao.merseine.nu/~dsr/