Heathe, I'm guessing many people use some level of port aggregation on their servers. The methods to do this vary based on the OS of your servers and the model of switches you have. Linux often goes under the name "Channel Bonding" while HPUX calls it "Port Aggregation".
Basically the switch and the server group connections together into one logical link. You will still have one host name and won't need to fool with anything else. You'll need to do some research on how to do it with your OS and make sure your switches are set to the proper setting. We trashed our network pretty badly one time when things were not set correctly (older switches looping) so make sure you do it right :-) Jeff On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 2:33 PM, Heathe Kyle Yeakley <hkyeak...@gmail.com>wrote: > I had a question about how everyone else utilizes the NICs inside your > master and media servers. > > I have 1 master and 2 media. Like most systems these days, I have 3-4 > NICs in each one. The administrator that setup our existing environment > plumbed 1 NIC per machine, and the other NICs sit there, completely > unused. At night, when our backup are running, it isn't unheard of for > the NICs on all three machine to reach a high utilization level. > > This got me to thinking. I've read that you can set an option in the > bp.conf file and have various clients backup to different interfaces on > the same physical master and/or media server, but I've never actually > deployed that feature. I've also heard of a technology called Link > Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) that allows you to tie multiple NICs > together to increase the total bandwidth into your server. > > Does anyone else employ these technologies? > Does everyone else just plumb one NIC and let the backups trickle in as > fast as the LAN allows? > Is there other aggregation technology out there that folks are using to > utilize and squeeze more bandwidth out of those unused NICs? > > Thanks. > > - Heathe Kyle Yeakley > > _______________________________________________ > Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu > http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu > -- Jeff Cleverley Unix Systems Administrator 4380 Ziegler Road Fort Collins, Colorado 80525 970-288-4611
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