We're having a nice challenge here at the office. We currently have 2 cabinets with one switch each. We have 2 uplinks in total for the 2 cabinets. The switches are linked to each other with a single Ethernet cable so everything keeps working when one of the uplink fails. The switches have no redundant power. And that's there the trouble starts.
We're currently looking at buying two new switches to replace the current ones. The current ones are quite old and need to be replaced. We'd like to go to a situation where the two switches are fully redundant, so we can loose one of them without noticing anything. Without redundant power supplies... (they cost about the same as a switch, which is roughly 1300 euros)
So, our idea was to put one 48-port switch into each cabinet and connect all servers to both switches. But, we would like all servers to have one IP address to handle the traffic and that IP should keep working even if one switch drops (so either both interface would need to listen to that IP or there should be some fail-over). We know ucarp, but that would still result in downtime (though minimal). We've been looking at bonding two interfaces together and we're investigation that right now.
My question is, is there any other way to achieve what we want (perhaps at the switch level)? The switch we're looking at is the HP A5120-48G EI.