In relation to a storage series which I plan on posting soon, I was scouring the Internet searching for ways of improving network transfer without selling kidneys. One very cool option is to implement a point-to-point Infiniband architecture between servers. Since I have a pair of storage servers that would benefit from >1Gbit/s speeds, this sounded ideal. I got the idea from a poster called “Flain.” Using a pair of Mellanox cards and some short CX4 cabling, it is possible to get 10Gbit between machines for around $100.
Some things to keep in mind should you be interested. First, this is for crazy people. Home users have almost no use for anything beyond 1Gbit networking. Secondly, few systems would even be capable of handling data at beyond 1Gbit speeds. GigE has a theoretical maximum throughput of 125MB/s. This is roughly what modern 7,200 RPM HDDs can push for sustained transfer. High end SSD users, on the other hand, have hardware more than capable of maxing out GigE. Since my use case involves shuffling data between two very fast disk arrays, I have to conclude that I NEED 10Gbit 🙂