Javier's questions

I'm having big troubles when adding this Dell switch to my network.

Here we use several VLANs to segment traffic. All switches (3com and DLink mostly) have configured the same VLANs, most ports are 'untagged' and belong to a single VLAN, except for the ports used to join together the switches (in a star topology), these ports belong to all VLANs and use 802.1Q tags. So far, it works really well.

But on this new switch (a Dell PowerConnect 5448), the settings are very different (and confusing). I have configured the same VLANs, an the uplink ports are set in 'general' mode (supposed to be fully 802.1Q compliant), I can set the VLAN membership as 'T' on these ports for all VLANs except VLAN 1. It always stay as 'U' on VLAN 1.

Any ideas?

I'm contemplating the next restructuring of my medium-size storage. It's currently about 30TB, shared via AoE. My main options are:

1. Keep as is. It can still grow for a while.
   • Go iSCSI. currently it's a little slower, but there are more options
   • Fibre Channel.
   • InfiniBand.

Personally, I like the price/performance of InfiniBand host adapters, and most of the offerings at Supermicro (my preferred hardware brand) have IB as an option.

Linux has had IPoIB drivers for a while; but I don't know if there's a well-known usage for storage. Most comments about iSCSI over IB talk about iSER, and how it's not supported by some iSCSI stacks.

So, does anybody have some pointers about how to use IB for shared storage for Linux servers? Is there any initiator/target project out there? Can I simply use iSCSI over IPoIB?