Original post follows. Apologies for the delayed summary and thanks to
those who responded: Jill Toth, Joe Fletcher and Pat O'Brien.
After sorting through their responses, we have decided on the following:
2 ea. DEGPA-SA PCI to SX (MMF) Gigabit Ethernet Adapters (for Alpha 4100s)
2 ea. 234457-B21 2M Multi Mode Fiber Cable for the NICs
1 ea. 3C17702 3com SuperStack 3 switch 4900 SX
1 ea. 3C17710 3com SuperStack 3 switch 4900 1000BASE-SX Module
Here are the responses from the three champions:
Pat:
Made the investment, and is not happy. my throughput still after 2 months
of
squeezing answers out of dec is about 200 mbits/s between 7 alpha server
gs140's. If i had to do over, I would install multiple de500 in a netraid
configuration utilizing full duplex. part of my issue is my gs140 only have
a 32 bit pci bus, and the cards run in both 32 and 64. but you need the 64
to get the speed, and need to do jumbo packets if your switch will allow.
Joe:
You need a DEGPA. Recommend using the fiber option rather than copper.
When you install it make sure you disable autonegotion (see man alt for
details). FYI I have an ES40 with one of these cards feeding directly into
a Superstack II 3300 with the appropriate card in the back. Works a treat.
If you want something a bit heavier my old site uses a Cabletron
Smartswitch 6000 as the main backbone switch. We had DEGPAs fed from DS20s
directly into the 6000 via fiber PIMs. Quite a nice chassis based switch.
You will find the throughput is very processor dependant. EV6s are required
to get the best out of the DEGPA. Bear in mind you will also need fast disks
or even a RAMdisk to feed a 100MB/s link
Jill:
We have an AS4100 with a DEGPA card and it is our database server and
NSR server. We used to also have a Gigabit card in a 1200, but I put the
FastEthernet card back in because FTP hung between the two servers, and
NSR timed out and abended.
It connects to a Cisco Catalyst 6509 using a SX-GBIC (1000mg) full duplex
according to someone on our Network Architecture team.
Darryl Milczarek
EMS 602 258-8545
darryl.milczarek_at_emsusa.com
> The pressure is on to make a change to Gigabit for our
> server backbone and I hope you can share with me some
> of your collective expertise.
> I will gladly summarize solutions.
>
> Background information:
> We have two AlphaServer4100 servers running Tru64 4.0g, one
> with an external StorageWorks RAID Array 450 cabinet.
> Server1 (with the StorageWorks) is our Oracle 8i dataserver,
> and Server2 is our Oracle 11i middle tier server (listeners,
> forms/reports services, concurrent managers, web servers).
> Each Alpha Server currently has two DE500-BA 10/100 NICs, one
> going to a 100MB hub which is connected to our Firewall and
> then to the Internet Router. The other NIC goes to our 100MB
> backbone 3com SuperStack II Switch 3000 along with 4 other
> (Intel) servers (NT & Novell).
>
> Questions:
> We want to upgrade our server backbone to gigabit. What NICs,
> and switch would you suggest might be cost effective? Can we
> get good performance with copper wire?
>
> Goals:
> One goal is to improve communication speed between the two
> Alpha servers for Oracle performance. A second goal is to
> reduce backup time as the TZ89 on Server1 must backup some
> directories on Server2 over the LAN connection using Legato.
Received on Sat Feb 03 2001 - 00:35:13 NZDT