Summary: OT: GigE Card for Ultra-30

Dear Managers,

Thanks for your replies, esp

King, Brooke
Peers, Julie
joe.fletcher@btconnect.com

SysKonnect's cards seemed to be most people's favorites, taking into
consideration price/performance(infact Brooke mentioned seeing better
performance). Though the sysKonnect cards are believed to be "only" GigE.

The Sun Part # is x1141a

I was able to get SysKonnect cards(Cu-Based) for about $425

I might upgrade to the same over Christmas, especially considering the
great prices of GigE switches.

I am also appending Brooke's post and my original posting.

Apologies for the late summary.


/dev/null

devnull@adc.idt.com

Brooke's email
--------------

A couple of years ago at a different company, I benchmarked SysKonnect's
copper-based GigE cards against Sun's fiber-based cards using Extreme 48i
switches and E420R servers. The SysKonnects were always at least a little
bit faster and sometimes a good 25% faster. Still, both were good, and I'm
confident media had little to do with the results. Even happier for us,
the
SysKonnect cards were substantially less expensive than the Sun cards.
Coupled with savings on GBICs we didn't need and using copper instead of
fiber, we chose the SysKonnect solution.

Nowadays Sun ships someone's GigE cards, and they're 10/100/1000 cards,
unlike SysKonnect's, which were (and I believe still are) simply GigE.
However, I wonder if something is given up in speed for such flexibility.
I
have not benched any NICs since the time I mentioned above so I don't
know.

I got my SysKonnect cards from Intervision, http://www.intervision.com/,
and
my contact was Amber Lindsay (spelling?). I do not know if she is still
there. We ended up not needing many SysKonnect cards, but SysKonnect was
kind enough to provide the cards to try out before we bought them. Then we
bought the rest through the reseller, Intervision.

A nice feature of SysKonnect is that they do offer dual interface cards
that
could be useful to some folks. That was beyond our need. They also
supported
trunking. SysKonnect also listened to me and made interface configuration
an
optional part of their driver's package installation. I liked dealing with
SysKonnect. Alas, I know my contact there is no longer with them, but I
can
easily imagine their having continued to ship good products with good
service.

Brooke


-----Original Message-----
From: devnull@adc.idt.com [mailto:devnull@adc.idt.com]
Sent: Wednesday, November 06, 2002 3:21 PM
To: sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org
Subject: OT: GigE Card for Ultra-30


Dear Managers,

I am trying to buy a Gigabit Ethernet card(PCI) for my Ultra-30. I would
prefer to use Copper, unless some of ya'll have seen anything special
while
using a fiber card.

Any recommendations for the card ? Place to buy them from ?

Many Thanks,

Regards.
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