On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 10:46 AM, Kim Longenbaugh <[email protected]> wrote: > You mentioned fiber, but that won't improve the speed, since a gig over > fiber is the same as a gig over copper, except for the distances > involved.
From what I've read, ten gig Ethernet is still predominantly a fiber technology. 10GBASE-T (10 gig over twisted pair at 100 meter lengths) is not working as well as the fiber stuff (yet). Higher latency. (I could be wrong or behind the times, I've never touched the stuff myself.) If I needed link aggregation, I'd install Intel server NICs in the computers. They work well with our HP ProCurve switches. Intel has some NICs with 2 and 4 ports on them; link aggregation is one of the applications. One thing to be wary of: The speeds under discussion are starting to approach the limits of other I/O subsystems, like disk and system bus. A single disk is going to be hard pressed to keep up with even a single gigabit channel. Most PCI bus configurations can't handle a single gigabit channel without saturating the bus. (And up to four slots can share one bus.) PCI-Express is better, in theory, but I imagine the bandwidth of the controller hub and RAM matter, too. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
