[K12OSN] RE: Networking a new school for K12LTSP?

[Petre Scheie]

Krsnendu dasa wrote:
> On 27/01/07, Sam Snow <snowsam at laurel-point.net> wrote:
>> >
>> know if they are sitting side by side or 50 ft away. The bottleneck would
>> come from how the switches and servers are connected. You want (at least)
>> a gigabit uplink to the switches from the servers and then a 
>> multi-gigabit
>> (via trunking/port aggregation) links between the switches if they are
>> large. If they are smaller then you are fine with just a single gigabit
>> feeding a small switch.
>>
>> 100MB* 8 ports switch (each with one computer hooked up, pulling the full
>> 100 MB) = 800 MBits/sec. This would be a fine situation to use a single
>> gigabit uplink.
>>
>> 100MB*48 port switch (each with one computer hooked up, each pulling only
>> 50 MB/sec-- half as much traffic as before!) = 2.4GB/sec of data being
>> pulled. If the traffic was being pulled from three 1GB capable servers 
>> (in
>> theory) your bottle neck would be the switch uplink rather than the
>> servers.
> I have a 8 port gigabit switch that plugs directly into the server.
> Each classroom has an 8 port 100Mb switch with 6-8 clients. Is the
> bottleneck at the 8 port switch anything to worry about?
> 
If the 8-port switch in each classroom has only 100Mb ports, that is, it has no gigabit 
ports, then all your clients are being squeezed into a single 100Mb connection as their 
packets go from the 100Mb switch to the gigabit switch.  At 6-8 clients that may not be 
a problem, but if the clients start running graphically intensive apps, such as TuxType, 
that shared 100Mb link could be a problem.  If your users aren't seeing a problem, then 
you don't have a problem. ;-)

Petre