Need suggestions for a 24-port Gigabit switch

[Silenus]

Hi there!
I am looking for some advice and suggestions on getting a switch that will do what I need it to do. Let me give some details.

This is for the company I work for. In the assembly/production area we build computers and load them up using ghost. There is a simple file server holding the images and it connects to a simple unmanaged switch out to multiple "wokrstations" where the new machines get images loaded. We have grown somewhat and are at the point where we are often trying to ghost to multiple machines at once, perhaps 6-8 at once. We need to add a few more stations so I'm looking a total of about 15 stations that could be used for laoding. Running cable is no problem. As you might imagine things are getting bottlenecked pretty bad once you try to start ghosting multiple machines through the single port on the server. So...I want to add a new 24-port switch, and add a quad port server NIC to the file server, and set up link aggregation into the switch on 4 ports. That would leave 20 ports for the stations of which 15 will be used currently. I need some suggestions of switches that can do this with breaking the bank. Or other suggestions if you think there is a better way.

It crossed my mind to see if there might be a gigabit switch that has a 10G uplink to the file server but I have a feeling trying to do that may not be financially possible (I don't know enough about what that would really cost). I am open to suggestions however!

PS- The disk system in the file server will likely become the next bottleneck but that I can take care of. I am a lot more comfortable with hard drives and RAID arrays than I am with networking.

 

[hoihtah]

sorry if this is unrelated. what software are you using to ghost?
norton? which version?

i've used similar setup before.
ghosting about 7 systems at once.
i started out with a 8 port 10/100 unmanaged switch.
then moved over to gigabit ones, thinking that it'll reduce the time.
but to my surprise, it didn't. systems were all on gigabit nic.

also, ghosting 1 system vs 7 system didn't make difference either.
so i concluded that the software is the bottleneck.


do let us know of your results.

 

[theevilsharpie]

Pretty much any managed switch can do what you ask. I tend to favor HP ProCurve switches because of their high quality, ease of use, and reasonable price.

For your link aggregation, you'll want a switch that supports LACP, although imaging multiple machines at once (presumably using the same image) would be more efficient if you used multicasting instead.

A 10GbE uplink will increase the price of the switch by several thousand dollars, and a even single-port 10GbE NIC is pretty expensive relative to GigE gear. Considering that you're using this for imaging a small number of machines, 10GbE is probably out of your budget.

 

[Emulex]

1810 is a very nice low end switch - symantec ghost server definitely uses multicast to ghost - start up every machine and wait for multicast and boom. most machines don't even eat up gigabit since the drives are so slow

 

[azev]

get switch that support multicast. You can setup ghost to image however many machine via multicast and the server will only stream the data once. This way even a gigabit switch will provide enough bandwidth for ghosting many machine at once.