Mellanox InfiniBand card

[DennisG]

Hello,

I was looking for an option to get more than 1Gbit/s speeds between my NAS and my backup NAS and found some cheap mellanox InfiniBand cards on eBay (Mellanox Voltaire Single Port 10 Gbps InfiniBand HCA PCI-E x8 410Ex PN 501S00045 is the description). Is anybody using similar cards? According to https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-infiniband/2016-May/000291.html they should work in FreeNAS 9.10, but I wanted to ask if somebody confirm that they work before I order them.

Thanks in advance

 

[maffo]

Not sure why you'd want to go the Infiniband way when a standard Fibre Channel will do the same for half the price. Look at Qlogic or Emulex cards that are supported by FreeBSD / FreeNAS

 

[DennisG]

Thank you for your answer. I wanted to use InfiniBand, because I wanted to replicate datasets with zfs send which as far as I know isn't possible over Fibre Channel but over IPoIB.

 

[danb35]

Another option would be 10GbE with a pair of cheap NICs like these. They're very well-supported under FreeBSD, and would only need a patch cable to connect them. Admittedly, the S310s are pretty old, but they should still work.

 

[DennisG]

Those would be a great option, they don't seem to be commonly available in Germany and other 10 GBit/s Ethernet solutions are too expensive.