[K12OSN] A question about gigabit

[Les Mikesell]

On Mon, 2004-08-30 at 09:36, Mark Cockrell wrote:

> So, here's my question:  With everything else on my LAN being 10/100 
> would gigabit help me at all.  I could buy a new gigabit switch and 
> connect the server to it and it to the rest of my network, but it seems 
> to me that I would just be moving the bottleneck up the stream a few 
> inches.  Is my thinking correct, or would a gigabit switch, even if it's 
> the only one on the network, be advantageous?  I welcome any thoughts on 
> the subject.

Each client will get along fine with 100M - the problem is that
they all talk to the same server so it gets the total of all
the client traffic.  In a 2-nic setup, all of the clients are
branched off the the same switch, so there is a bandwidth
increase from using a switch that has one or two gig ports
and connecting that to the server.  You would get the same
for any clients on the same switch but for the rest you
would need to build a gig backbone interconnecting any
switches that have more than 10 or so clients.  It might
end up being cheaper to add more servers in the 2-nic
configuration - or at least park the server with a gig
uplink on the same switch as your biggest concentration
of clients.

---
   Les Mikesell
    les at futuresource.com