[nycbug-talk] Good article about gigabit performance issues

[Tillman Hodgson]

On Sun, Apr 17, 2005 at 12:38:10PM -0700, pete wright wrote:
> Another, maybe more typical, architecture I have found is using
> "fat-packets" on a seperate gig-e only network for backend servers. 
> The idea is that you would have backups, DB and NAS servers talking to
> each other via this quicker network which will hopefully speed up some
> client/server operations.

Yeah, multiple ring networks are how I normally implement GigE too. I
prefer to put backup/administrative and NAS on seperate rings and
everything else onto a general ring, typically still at GigE but running
"normal" sized frames so that multiple 100Mbit clients can still see
some benefit.

File serving and backups (a variant of file serving, really) truly shine
with large frames. The 3rd ring of "general services" tends to have
smaller packets anyway which means that large frame support would often
go unused.

While this scheme solves all kinds of problems, it makes cabling more
interesting than I really like. And with GigE you can't share links over
a single cat6 cable as all 4 pairs are used. I'm definitely ready for a
12-pair cable standard ;-)

-T


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