Help with planing a gigabit network

[Raj Potula]

Hi all,

We are currently a small company with an old network that is choking our pipeline and giving us nightmares. We are planning to upgrade now and are looking for advice. We have consulted couple of companies but we are not sure what to go aherad with.

This is what we need:

Our current network is connected to an IBM server and a cisco switch and we have about 40 users connected to it. When all of them access the server at the same time, we get about 10mbps speed per person. Otherwise, it's around 25 mbps. Is this normal speed? What we are looking for is something that would allow all the 40 users speeds of about 100mbps at-least, even when all of them are accessing the server. We have also considered but they seem to be very expensive. We are an animation studio, so lot of images with high resolution.

Any advice would really really help.

Thanks,

Raj

 

[ch33zw1z]

Storing all the images on the network server?

You're going to want gigabit

What's the ibm server machine type and config?

 

[mv2devnull]

You did not exactly tell what you have.

If you had 41 machines connected to a switch, all with 1 Gpbs links, and 40 would simultaneously access the 1 server, then each "client" would get 1 Gps / 40 == 25 Mbps of the link between the switch and the server. Furthermore, the server would serve at 1 Gbps.

Images, yes, but is the "server" a disk or a HPC resource?

Numerically, 100 Mbps * 40 == 4 Gbps. At that speed one can transfer almost 500 MB per second. The bottleneck may no longer (if even now) be the link, but the disks.

You did not tell what can be done with the current server (network-wise).
You did not tell what can be done with the current switch.
You did not tell what the consulted companies did suggest.

 

[mxnerd]

You can divide users into groups and put them on different servers.

You can upgrade cables, you can upgrade switches, you can upgrade network adapters.

In essence, you need local professionals to give you advices.

You said you already have advices from professionals, what were their suggestions?

 

[sdifox]

Assuming the server is fast enough to serve up content, you just need to give it bigger pipe. Either through link aggreggation or get a 48port gigabit witch with 10gbps uplink port and connect server to one of the 10gbps uplink ports.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Either through link aggreggation or get a 48port gigabit witch with 10gbps uplink port and connect server to one of the 10gbps uplink ports.

This.

Get a switch with a couple of 10GbE ports, and a bunch of 1GbE ports, and connect the server to a 10GbE link, and the local machines to the 1GbE ports. Maybe another 10GbE port uplink to another switch, serving the other half of the clients.

 

[spikespiegal]

10GbE ports or upgrading to a fully managed 1Gb switch won't make local storage on a server run faster, and that's going to be the next bottleneck.

I'm betting the OP is confusing mbps with MBps.

10MBps is about right for a 10/100 switch that's saturated.

25MBps is about right for a lightweight SATA based server under sustained load from multiple clients.