Quote:
Originally Posted by riteup3  Hi Steven,
What brand of NICs did you go with? 3Com seems popular among IT pros.
Is it PCI Express based?
Thanks,
ron
edit: i just noticed the keyword "trunked" in your message. i feel that's a major reason why you can achieve such speeds on your network. care to tell us a bit more of the logistics involved in building your trunked network? how many cards per computer, switches involved etc... very interesting to me at least. |
Most of my PC are still PCI or PCI-X so I have'nt had the chance to use a PCE-e version yet. I have found some very cheap 3Com996B-T server NIC on eBay, that have a Broadcom chip and support TCP offload. I also got my hands on a couple on Intel Pro dual Gigabit NICs that have two Gb connections that can be trunked.
The audio network is running through a dedicated switch to avoid collisions with data packets not belonging to our audio work (other PCs or Mac used for studio management for example). We use a Lindy 24 port manageable switch. It's important to go for a proper brand where the switch is concerned (though I had'nt heard of Lindy before): look for Cisco stuff for example. The management allows you to trunk x number of ports (usually up to 8) to connect one device through multiple Gigabit ports. Our Dell server has 2 ports that are trunked (generic trunking mode, nothing fancy) with the Broadcom Control Suite software (good piece of NIC management software, comes with all NIC sporting Broadcom chips).
The throughput of the server to the workstations is quite amazing, with better performance through the network than on local SATA drives (both in access times and in bandwidth).
The server is running Windows Storage Server 2003 R2. I had to look into this a bit, and found some invaluable information in Windows Server 2003 for Dummies!
