Introduction
Project overview
I was trundling along just fine with my very cheap e-waste managed gigabit switches. 940Mbps ought to be enough for anyone, right?
Two things happened which inspired me to upgrade beyond Gigabit Ethernet. First, my ISP sent out emails announcing that existing customers were getting a free upgrade to 2Gbps download speeds. I'd never had access to faster-than-gigabit internet before, and so I'd had no real need for faster-than-gigabit home networking.
Around the same time, I began expanding my server collection from one to, eventually, three Proxmox nodes. I realized that migrating VMs and containers between nodes was kind of slow at 1Gbps. And the little, expensive voice at the back of my head started to chime in.
"What if you upgraded your home network? You could get all those extra ISP gigabits, and containers would transfer faster too!"
Sometimes I wish I was better at ignoring that voice.
I started working out what I'd need to do to do better than 1Gbps. Ultimately, it involved:
- replacing my router
- replacing my main network switches
- eventually, pulling fiber in a few places
- for good measure, pulling some Ethernet to a few rooms that didn't already have it
- buying >1Gbps network adapters for the devices I cared about
Some of those points are worth elaborating on, but the most involved part of this project ended up being...
The switches
Originally I started out with a pair of Juniper EX3300-24Ts. I wrote a little more about them here.
I managed to retire one of those switches in favour of a Brocade[1] ICX 7450-24.
Why only one of them, you ask?
Never mind all that though. One Brocade is doing just fine in my office, where it doesn't have to be shoved into a ceiling. (It was probably an ill-advised idea to put one in an enclosed space anyways.)
Why Brocade ICX switches? Why the ICX 7450?
Unlike the Junipers, Brocade switches have official support resources available to home users like me. As well, the Brocade ICX switches are much more popular in homelabs, and have excellent resources by Fohdeesha with an associated following on the Serve The Home forums. So I drew some inspiration from there.
The forum thread I linked above has a guide to some of the most relevant ICX models for homelabs. You'll find a number of comments, including from Fohdeesha themselves, dissuading you from purchasing the 7450, with reasons such as:
"The ICX 6610 has more >1G ports."
This is true; the ICX 6610 offers more connectivity. It provides 8 SFP+ cages up front, and four QSFP+ cages in back, two of which can become 4x more SFP+ connections each through breakout cables. In contrast the 7450 can have at most 12 SFP+ cages, and you lose four at a time for every QSFP+ cage you need. But I don't need the extra ports. My original planned topology had one 40G uplink between two switches, and I don't need more than ~6 SFP+ connections in any one switch beyond that. And as my plans changed, so could the modules I installed in the 7450.
"The 7450 modules are expensive."
It's true. I paid more for all the 4x10G 7450 modules I bought than I would have paid for two entire ICX 6610s. And the 7450 chassis I bought to put them in weren't any cheaper. But I weighed that against one point that was really important to me:
The ICX 7450-24 consumes less than 60W as configured in my network.
Brocade says the ICX 6610 will use 120W or more in any of its available configurations - see for yourself. In contrast, the little baby 7450-24 has a rated idle load of 63W, and in practice, mine use even less. I don't need 48 1G ports[2], I don't need 16 SFP+ connections, and I don't need PoE. Given that I have to live with these things - one in my office, directly beside me, and one originally planned to be stuffed up in that ceiling access panel - halving the power consumption is a big win. It means I can install quieter fans, and have less heat slowly roasting me when I have to be in the office with the door closed.
And I managed to put together each 7450, fully equipped with all the modules I needed, and modified to be livable in a home environment, for less than any new-in-box 10G options available to me.
Footnotes
As far as I can follow: Foundry was the original manufacturer of the ICX switch line; they were purchased by Brocade, who sold their switch lines to Ruckus, who was purchased by Commscope - who knows who'll spin the M&A wheel again. So there are a few brand names attached to these things online. I'll refer to them mostly as Brocade switches, because that's who seems to have owned them when homelabbers found them, or at least I think most ICX switches available to homelabbers have Brocade branding. But if you're looking for resources, as of this writing, the Ruckus website provides documentation and software. ↩︎
I don't even need 24 ports, to be honest. But I do need more than 8! ↩︎