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    Intel 82574L looses to Realtek RTL8111E Ethernet

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved Hardware
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    • stephenw10S
      stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
      last edited by

      That's some fairly extensive testing, I guess uptime is really important to you,  ;)

      You've clearly tested more hardware than I have probably ever seen!

      Steve

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      • ?
        A Former User
        last edited by

        we have a 99.9% uptime requirement… with the exception of the fiasco of the boss
        that moved us to Cisco without testing in the lab first, we have had 100% uptime
        but we have built redundancy into every possible place.

        my budget just for testing new machines each year is around 1Million Dollars...

        Budget on what ive already spent this year on new hardware to deploy...
        1 Million in new hardware...

        but you have to consider we have:

        8 warehouses around the world we ship from (7 of the warehouses are in the US)
        equipment in 20 DataCenters around the world
        20 office buildings full of employees taking orders 24/7

        its a shame that all the equipment that fails our tests (that is BRAND new) gets
        destroyed but its corp policy.

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        • T
          tirsojrp
          last edited by

          @SunCatalyst:

          its a shame that all the equipment that fails our tests (that is BRAND new) gets
          destroyed but its corp policy

          Used to work under similar rules, discarded equipment is destroyed, at least 99% is fully working equipment that should be donated.

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          • stephenw10S
            stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
            last edited by

            @SunCatalyst:

            my budget just for testing new machines each year is around 1Million Dollars…

            :o OK
            I'll upgrade my earlier statement to 'definitely more hardware than I've ever seen'.

            Steve

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            • M
              margen
              last edited by

              I've used 3 RealTek 8139 10/100BaseTX NICs (2 WAN in failover + 1 LAN) for the past 3-4 years. It's a very old non-server platform that mostly does NAT for 30-40 clients and barely pushes the 100/100 mbit WAN to its limit, and not for longer than a couple of hours a day. The office-hours utilization would be around 30/30 mbit on average.

              It's nothing like the above scenarios, but still I have to say that I have NEVER experienced any problems with the NICs. Before I had to upgrade to 2.0.2 I logged over 1 year uptime.

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              • ?
                A Former User
                last edited by

                i have to agree that the equipment should be donated somewhere or resold… not destroyed...

                MOST of our Gigabit connections are at about 80% utilization (which is really damn close to
                what the physical hardware can transmit on the wire after the tcp stack).

                we HAVE to have systems that dont fail under the load or crash... currently looking for 10GE Nics at the
                moment to get some relief as our traffic gets to be more and more each year...
                10Ge seems to be ALOT thinner pickings that are supported under FreeBSD 8.3 (pfsense 2.1 Beta)

                and i DOUBT we will be running intel Nics at 10GE..

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                • D
                  dhatz
                  last edited by

                  @SunCatalyst:

                  MOST of our Gigabit connections are at about 80% utilization (which is really damn close to
                  what the physical hardware can transmit on the wire after the tcp stack).

                  we HAVE to have systems that dont fail under the load or crash… currently looking for 10GE Nics at the
                  moment to get some relief as our traffic gets to be more and more each year...
                  10Ge seems to be ALOT thinner pickings that are supported under FreeBSD 8.3 (pfsense 2.1 Beta)

                  and i DOUBT we will be running intel Nics at 10GE..

                  Have you considered configuring 2 x GbE ports in LACP ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_aggregation

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                  • ?
                    A Former User
                    last edited by

                    we have thought about it BUT…... most of our uplink providers DONT support it..
                    OR its cheaper to do 10GE drop to us and having to have redundancy built into
                    everything , that complicates stuff tremendously

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                    • D
                      dhatz
                      last edited by

                      Well FreeBSD-HEAD (what will eventually become FreeBSD 10) has recently updated drivers for several 10 GbE NICs, such as Chelsio, Emulex and Intel. I'm not sure how much of that code has been backported to FreeBSD 8.x though …

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                      • P
                        phil.davis
                        last edited by

                        @SunCatalyst - I volunteer with an organisation in Nepal - www.inf.org - we have nothing like "western country" bandwidths available, just getting WiMax technology in the last few months with Nepal Telecom guaranteeing >1Mbps to corporate customers! We get our first WiMax connection on Monday. We are not going to saturate any ethernet chip any time soon, so equipment that has some obscure high-performance issue is no big deal. If your corporate has a change of heart, please PM me. We have fund-raising offices in various countries and can easily accept donations of electronics equipment and get it out to Nepal.

                        As the Greek philosopher Isosceles used to say, "There are 3 sides to every triangle."
                        If I helped you, then help someone else - buy someone a gift from the INF catalog http://secure.inf.org/gifts/usd/

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                        • ?
                          A Former User
                          last edited by

                          @phil.davis. if i had a choice i would do something like your suggesting BUT corp policy dictates otherwise.
                          i will be sending you a PM about other possibilities i MAY have for you.

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                          • T
                            tirsojrp
                            last edited by

                            Put me in the list, I work for an NGO that is always struggling with tight budgets for IT infrastructure.

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                            • N
                              n2qcn
                              last edited by

                              FUD can be debilitating.

                              There are bad experiences for both Intel (poor eerpom) and Realtek (poor TSO)

                              There are good experiences for both Intel and Realtek.

                              But at least on paper, the Realtek RTL8111E is a better design (with ECC and CRC) than the  Intel 82574L.

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                              • ?
                                A Former User
                                last edited by

                                ya and on paper that is… BUT MY REAL WORLD experiences tells me....
                                its all dependant on the motherboard manufacturer implementing EVERYTHING perfectly for a Stable system..

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                                • ?
                                  Guest
                                  last edited by

                                  Now compare a RTL8111e to an Intel i210.

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