Dual Port Server NIC

[Dozer]

Actually, people would describe them more as probably elephant ears

 

[mubs]

Yup, I can see them Dumbo ears in your avatar. And that thing in the center must be when you bumped your head in the doorway, I guess. Glad to have found ya, twin bro!

 

[Platform]

Also I repeat my point that if you're bonding together ethernet cards to increase the bandwidth out of your server (the usual requirement, after all) then the switch does not need to be intelligent to support this.

But it will have to be a switch that communicates by forwarding MAC addresses (a.k.a. -- Layer 2 switch) as opposed to a switch that works with network addresses (Layer 3 switch).

In my case, I needed network load balancing and failover capabilities for a server, either of which require an intelligent switch. The end result was 400 Mb/s Ethernet performance using a single Adaptec Quartet NIC.

 

[Platform]

Guess I missed that point .

It's far too easy to miss the point when communicating in this half-duplex fashion over the Internet :eekers:

I'm coming strictly from a situation where they already have a server with a 100Mb nic, a 10/100 switch, and transfer quite a bit of scanned images back and forth (internist medical office). They're the kind that won't pay $450 to buy a switch with a single GbE port and a GbE nic for the server.

But they might pay around US$230 for a four-port GbE switch. I've seen 'em at this price at places like CompUSA -- a little NetGear thingee.

So, James, I can stick an SMC 100Mb nic, a 3Com 100Mb nic in the server, install the drivers, connect them to the switch and have two independent, simultaneously active pipes in/out the server? How do clients know which nic to talk to? Because I'd divide the clients into two subnets and use a different server nic for each?

Pipes: Are we talking about port bonding (a.k.a. -- port aggregation)? The answer would be no, because you need to have higher level software that enables port bonding between two hardware ports (MAC addresses) and one IP address. This higher-level software is only going to work with their NIC drivers. I'm not sure what 3Com or SMC has these days as far as software goes.

 

[Platform]

What about MS's version of Network load balancing?

Same concept, but quite different from a hardware standpoint. In the case of network load balancing using a cluster, you have some number of nodes (computers) that make up the cluster, with each cluster node providing network I/O for the whole of the cluster. The cluster can also provide enhanced computing and failover capabilities as well as network load balancing.