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Gigabit Help on network

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by jwgronner

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I just bought 4 new Dell rack mounted servers that have gb nics in them. The 4 servers will be chatting a lot amongst themselves due to some propriatary software we use in our business. If the servers have cat 5e cable between them through a 100mb switch will they still communicate at gb speed since both nic see a 1000 mb nic at the other end?? And if not why? Does the signal get degraded ( i only have 8 ft between the servers) and there is too much error correction and packet loss? It does seem like the 2 nics would try at 1 gb speed.
Any speed jocks out there??

2 replies

by sitizn wille

The servers will only comunicate at 100MB because if they go thought that 100MB switch that is as fast as the switch will transfer data.
You would have to get a switch with GigaBit ports.
Cheers
SW

by tomsal

I just got done explaining this to my fellow IT associates (keep in mind I'm the only one who does networking here though) who were trying to sell the company that if you have gigabit nics on each end that's all you need for gigabit links.

Since you are going through a 100mb switch, the transmission will have to step down to 100mb from 1000mb, because the switch only supports a maximum of 100mb.

The reason this is so has to do, quite simpy, to the physical characteristics of the switch -- its buffers, its ASICs, etc. Because of the hardware limitations preventing the switch handling more than 100mb, following the OSI model (which the TCP/IP suite is based on) the Data Link layer needs to assure the signal passes up the protocol stack, so flow control and error correction will kick in to limit it to what the network can handle. (LOTS of other stuff goes on, but let's be real I'm not going to type each layer in explicit detail..lol)

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