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Gigabit uplink

Offline jameswilson

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Gigabit uplink
« on: August 08, 2010, 11:03:42 PM »
Sorry I know this is technically the wrong place, but its sort of sme related.

I have a lot (well a lot for me 60 devices) that connect to a 100 meg port (ip cameras)
I need to pull a lot of bandwidth from these into a single device. The overall bandwidth will be more than 10/100 can handle.
Im hoping there is some sort of switch that will 'join' these ports into a single gigabit port so that i can maximise the throughput of a single gigabit port. As far as i understand a swicth will momenterily connect port to port. So if the devices are limited to 100meg thats as fast as the date will go into the gigabit port.

Does such a thing exist?

Offline christian

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Re: Gigabit uplink
« Reply #1 on: August 09, 2010, 01:20:42 AM »
I think a simple Gigabit Layer 2 switch will do what you want and they are reasonably cheap these days. If you want to go really cheap then perhaps a 100Mbps switch with a 1Gbps uplink. You may need more than one switch to service this many ports.

Switches have different techniques for transferring data from port to port but in the worst case it will have enough buffer to queue packets while it waits for the transfer. In your case with 60 cameras and assuming 10Mbps (yours are probably less than this) you would have the 1Gbps link running at 600Mbps which is fine. There would be minimal transfer delays between the ports.

Quote
As far as i understand a swicth will momenterily connect port to port. So if the devices are limited to 100meg thats as fast as the date will go into the gigabit port.
The links are serial in nature and typically have queues even on the cheapest ones so your uplink should not be limited by any input. In other words, you would have multiple 100Mb links feeding into the egress queue of the uplink and the uplink port would be emptying the queue as fast as the uplink will allow (ie. 1Gbps).

Not knowing your budget, D-Link and Netgear both make very inexpensive 24-port L2 switches and may offer some basic management capabilities. HP is a good and reasonably priced commercial grade product but there are other good choices in this category.


Hope that helps.
SME since 2003

Offline jameswilson

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Re: Gigabit uplink
« Reply #2 on: August 09, 2010, 02:09:41 AM »
Christian
Yes that helps massivly, wonderful, i know this was the place to ask.

Cisco small business switches are only a couple of hundred quid so i think i go for one of those.
btw waht is the difference between a l2 and l3 switch?

Offline christian

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Re: Gigabit uplink
« Reply #3 on: August 09, 2010, 02:22:53 AM »
btw waht is the difference between a l2 and l3 switch?
There are 7 layers in the ISO stack. Layer 1 is physical (eg. the wire); Layer 2 is link layer (e.g. MAC address switching); Layer 3 is network layer (e.g. IP address switching/routing).

Layer 2 you are switching within a subnet and it is addressed by the MAC address. Example: everything is within 10.1.5.x

A Router routes/switches at Layer 3 and allows you to send packets between sub nets. So if you want to send packets from say 10.1.5.100 to 10.2.37.6 you would need a router to know how to get from say 10.1.5.x to 10.2.37.y.

SME since 2003