Gigabyte Switch: Whats the Advantage/Use

[hermes980]

Hello all,

With data speeds and networking being a jungle, I am little confused.

I noticed a gigabyte swtich. I am curious as to what most people use these for, as in my office we have a database on a server that we share at 10/100mps. Would a gigabyte switch speed up access to the database assuming all computers had a gigabyte NIC 10/100/1000mps? Also for swapping files/saving from the server would the time it takes to save and download (transfer files, etc.) be sped up, or is that limited by the hard drive speed to which the person is saving?

Thanks for fielding this question...

 

[sturm]

You might see a small increase in speed but not much.
Gig switches really show when you have alot of users with high network activity. If your only running 10 or 20 users with occasional network activity then its not for you.
Yes hard drives can limit the transfer speeds. Thats why most corporations use scsi drives to take advantage of the extra speed.

 

[Pain]

I agree somewhat, but if you are transfering very large files then it will make a difference. If you are just hitting the server for word docs, etc, then you really won't notice it.

However, what you can do is put the server on a gig port, so if you get 10 people hitting the server at the same time it will be better able to handle the load, providing of course it has the horsepower and disk bandwidth itself.

 

[Madwand]

GigaBYTE switch and gigaBYTE NIC's? Yum, can I have some? I only have gigabit switches, and I'm getting jealous -- I could use the bandwidth at home to increase (large) file transfer performance.

Modern hard drives can easily do 30 MB/s file transfers or higher (for large enough files), and this is around 3x the limit of 100 Mb/s "fast" ethernet, so you can easily benefit from increasing your network bandwidth. You might even get a performance boost from a GbE switch and a GbE NIC on the server without GbE on all clients (in some cases, where the network is a bottleneck) -- the switch would buffer the data to one client, while the server could be transferring data for another client.

To answer the question of whether or not there would be an overall benefit, I suggest looking at the server's network bandwidth utilization during moderate to heavy workloads / workloads that you're interested in speeding up. If you see it hitting say around 70-80% or higher, then there's a good chance that upping the ceiling higher could give you some more headroom and improve overall performance.

Database performance can be very complicated, and in many cases, with high utilization, the network will not be the bottleneck, but the drive subsystem will. Such cases might not show any/much performance improvement with faster networking, while other scenarios in the same system might. Methods for analyzing this and improving overall performance are topic for experienced DBA's.