Looking for switch recommendations ...

[Chance Whaley]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-net at freebsd.org 
> [mailto:owner-freebsd-net at freebsd.org] On Behalf Of Wes Peters
> Sent: Tuesday, March 30, 2004 3:06 PM
> To: Steven Stremciuc; freebsd-net at freebsd.org
> Subject: Re: Looking for switch recommendations ...
> 
> 
> Every switch that does port mirroring probably has some 
> problems related to port mirroring, because mirroring 
> typically cannot be done in hardware.  If nothing else, you 
> can expect some degraded performance on the port(s) being 
> mirrored and on the port doing the mirroring, because the 
> packets have to be fondled by the CPU before they can be 
> switched.  Even with a really fast processor, this will 
> increase the latency a bit.

This is an untrue statement. There are several switch vendors that pride
themselves on their wire-speed mirroring capabilities - specifically their
ability to do it in hardware. Foundry's BigIron and the like comes to mind
as a highly reliable and fairly inexpensive (subjective) switch that is very
capable of doing multi-port wirespeed mirroring at line rate. 

.chance