[rescue] RE: Gigabit ethernet - worth it?

[Robert Novak]

I thought I'd me-too with James based on my limited, but usually high-end,
experience on this stuff. :)

On Mon, 28 Jan 2002, Fogg, James wrote:

> 1) your switch fabric is VERY important, since hosts can now flood your
> switch faster. Cheap switches will kill performance to sub-100mb
> performance.

I definitely agree on that. I'm used to the Nortel stuff, with an
Accelar/Passport 8600 and a few 1150s at work, and a 1050 at home, so I've
seen what probably is the limitation of the host side.

> 3) most hosts cannot really take advantage of gigabit. Sun Enterprises can
> come close, inter-switch links can, most others are a waste of money. A

We're loading up our first gig-sx PC (a Dell 6450 quad P3 Xeon 550 running
Win2k Server) and hopefully I'll start seeing some useful data transfer
from that. It's going port-to-port to the E450 with Sun gig-sx for
backups, so as we start loading it I'll start seeing useful info. It's
only the Intel SX NIC, so I don't expect 800Mbps. :) THe last dump was
6Mbps, but that was just a 2 minute incremental dump from a database I
won't name :)

--Rob 

Robert Novak, Indyramp Consulting * rnovak at indyramp.com * indyramp.com/~rnovak
        "And it's been a long December and there's reason to believe
           Maybe this year will be better than the last...." -- counting crows