[mschuster91]

> PCIe UARTs rather than USB, 2 GbE ports

I wonder what that overkill in speed is for. With serial ports you don't need that much bandwidth (48 ports x 100 kBits = 4,8 MBit/s, yes I know it's 115200 but too drunk for math). You could even run that thing with a 10 MBit/s LAN interface.

The only thing I understand is the PCIe stuff because USB latency can be problematic (especially on the Pi).

[tw04]

A lot of newer 10Gbe switches won't go to 100mbit. If you don't have gigE you aren't getting plugged in in a lot of datacenters nowadays.

[jhallenworld]

This reminds me that we used to use these network power switches: http://dataprobe.com/iboot.html

The problem with them is that they use just an 8051 microcontroller (talking to an ethernet controller over a parallel port)! Arp and other broadcast background traffic on modern networks overwhelms them.

[mschuster91]

Oh, thanks for the info. I thought all that stuff was backwards compatible...

[scurvy]

The Broadcom Trident 2/+ chipsets, that a lot of vendors use for their merchant silicon, only support 1, 10, and 40 gig PHY's. No more 10/100 on these switches (which are all over every datacenter).

[kenz0r]

As the poster below said, GbE is mandated by a lot of data centres. 2 ports is also pretty useful too - you can aggregate them if you're concerned about reliability, you can use the console server to segment out a management network etc.