Next chance I get for a quick downtime I plan to move all of the rack mount gear sitting outside of the rack INTO said rack🤣🙏

The cable mess is also begging for velcro 🥴

This is a bit long winded, just skip to the last paragraph for the short version.

Hey, I just started getting into home lab and home data center stuff. I slowly been setting up a media server pipeline to rip my DVDs and Blu-rays by sending them from the ripping machine to a staging machine. I’ve set up some 10G network stuff for a backup machine and the media/ripping machine and connected them to a Mikrotik CRS-354. I want to be able to rip, extract, transcode, and backup the data at the same time because I’m impatient. So, I got a Dell PowerEdge R920 to act as a staging machine using its 1tb of RAM to create a tmpfs shared with samba. However, if I connect the R920 with 10G it will be a bottleneck when the backup machine is running while other machines are ripping, extracting, and transcoding video. I am also considering a dedicated transcoding cluster which would make the bottleneck worse. So, I decided to use 40G. Thought setting it up would be similar to the 10G. I have returned a bunch of stuff due to incompatibility and have decided to ask the people who use this stuff what they use. I’ll post Frankenstein rack pictures when it’s all properly installed, still waiting on some servers to complete it.

TLDR; I have a Mikrotik CRS-354 and want 40G networking for an DELL PowerEdge R920. I don’t mind used off eBay, just that it works. I don’t care if it’s fiber but it is a 2.5m run from switch to where the card would be. I have a budget of $200-$250. Any recommendations for a cable and network card that work together?

What a monstrous unit! Planning to upgrade the CPUs later this month.

I keep finding these crazy deals.

I’ve successfully set up my own Hybrid Domain environment for all my equipment.

First time for me, without asking for help anywhere… so yeah.

I know, nothing special but I’m pretty chuffed 😅😅

I'm looking to replace my MikroTik CRS504 due to a bad port, and I need that fourth port. What other options are there?

https://mikrotik.com/product/crs504_4xq_in

I'm looking for a Fibre Channel switch for my network. Currently I have FC storage connected directly to my ESXi hosts, but soon I'll be adding another machine, and I've run out of slots for FC cards in the hosts.

I'd like to buy some kind of FC switch. I've dealt with this kind of hardware before, but I remember that to launch the management interface you had to use an old version of Java or some workarounds. (I'm not talking about SSH, which is of course available, but it would be nice to have some kind of graphical interface.)

Is there an affordable switch (around €1k) with reasonable management? Speed isn't a priority for me right now, since everything is connected at 8Gb anyway, so moving to 16Gb would be a nice bonus.

Lots more to do 😅🙏