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Is it possible to drop my cat5 for fiber on my server?

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Currently have an old server PowerEdge 1550/933 with a nic of 100Mbps. Dell recommended two parts one which was a nic with 100mbps and a fiber card. The server is getting hit hard and I need to upgrade the network connection. I thinking of using the fiber but, can I transfer all network traffic to the fiber? Unfortunately I cannot ditch the server.

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Clarifications

In reply to Is it possible to drop my cat5 for fiber on my server?

Clarifications

Go half-way and put in a gigbit NIC

In reply to Is it possible to drop my cat5 for fiber on my server?

..it will also take a big bite out of latency too.

gigabit nic

In reply to Go half-way and put in a gigbit NIC

The parts that Dell recommended is a 55HHP fiber card and 3710T (100Mbps) nic card. What I don’t understand is how to configure it for my network (user connections) to go thru the fiber card. In my shop all fibers are connected to my SANs from the servers – and with servers connected from cat5e to a fiber switch to a achive 1gigabit transfer rate (for user connections). Unfortunatly this one server cannot achieve 1gig with current hardware.

More info needed

In reply to Is it possible to drop my cat5 for fiber on my server?

-What sort of service does this machine provide?
-Does this server pull data from other sources?

It’s not just a question of slapping a faster piece of hardware in it, servers are typically more complicated than that. It usually involves some sort of configuration involving multiple NICs.

The poor performance of this particular server might not be from the old NIC (although a single 100 mbps is pretty slow). It might not even be from the server itself. It could theoretically be another service/piece of hardware that it depends on, like maybe the switch it’s connected to or the SAN that it pulls data from.

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