I'm looking at co-locating some servers and I need a bit of advice. I need a recommendation for a switch to sit between 8 servers and a 10 Mbps ethernet port to the internet. The switch should be able to provide bandwidth usage info on each server and, if possible, act as a simple firewall to help protect the servers. Are there any that can also limit how much of the 10 Mbps bandwidth to the internet a single server can use ?
Can someone point me in the right direction?
TIA,
-- David
Your requirements, particularly the firewalling capability, dictate that you need more than just a "simple switch."
More specifically, you will need a small router, preferably one with firewall capability. I would suggest having a look at Zyxel's newly-released ZyWall 5. It will probably settle out between $200-$300 street price.
You should use a separate switch or hub that the Zyxel or router plugs into a port on. You can find BayStack 350T series switches for cheap on Ebay, and they should be more than up to the task (I use a pair of 350T-24's myself).
Keep the peace(es).
A Cisco switches, such as a 3550 would work well. It can support rather complex Access Control Lists (ACLs) on a per port basis as well as rate limiting. You can also do pvlans to prevent the servers from seeing each other. The 2950's are the cheaper version of the 3550, but you'd want to verify they can do the rate limiting.
For the Cisco switches, you can use the free MTRG software on one of the servers to monitor the traffic flows (uses snmp to query the port statistics)
Another option would be a used Cisco router and a 8-port dumb hub. Used Cisco routers like a 2500 or 2600 series might be a cheaper option and still let you do the rate limiting, accounting, and ACLs you want. You don't really need anything high-speed here.
-Chris
hi David,
What you need a an Extreme Networks switch. I am sure a simple solution can do what you want, but if the requirements change just a little bit, you'd have to re-invest in hardware again..
The Summit200
Planning for future use, you can think of things like SLB (Server Load Balancing), advanced routing (BGP,OSPF,PIM,...), redundancy features (VRRP, ESRP, Spanning tree, EAPS), QoS (Quality of Service), and line-rate Access-lists, DOS protection, and much more.
The Extreme switches are priced very well, and will keep you prepared for future changes.
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