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Network Throughput

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by bporter

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I am looking for some input on ways to improve the configuration of our network.

Currently, we have 4 wiring closets, three of which have 3Com SuperStackII 3300 switches (24pts). The last closet has just a few connections and is connected to oneof the 3300s with a 3Com Office Connect 100mb switch.

The three 3300s then feed into our computer room. In that room, there is another Office connect switch that each 3300 connects to as well as our 3 servers.

All of the workstations are on 100mb 3com cards. The servers all have 3com managable server NICs. All of the servers are PIII 800 or faster with a minimum of 512ram and use RAID 5 SCSI config for the drive config.

This tends to work fine - but there are times when throughput seems to come to a crawl and there isn't lots of utilization on the servers.

In my mind, I see the switch in our computer room being the bottle neck. Any thoughts on what should/could be changed.

TIA,

Byron

7 replies

by turambar386

While not familiar with the 3com switches, here's a couple of ideas.

The problem may as you suspect be the backbone switch. However, before you consider upgrading it you may want to look at the possibility of having larger trunks between the switches. If you have or can free up an extra port per access switch, create a two-cable trunk to the backbone switch (you will also need an extra 3 free ports on that switch).

By doing this, you will ensure that it isn't simply the 100MB trunks to the backbone that are the bottleneck.

by joshg

I think that the bottleneck is probably the OfficeConnect products. These are designed for low end networking such as SOHO. The 3300 are adequate, but you may want to swap the OC Switch for a 3300 as well.

by bobby gillette

Depending on your budget, the best option would be to purchase a campus switch product that has a fairly sizeable backplane (2+Gb). A good product is an HP ProCurve 4000m. You can purchase fiber uplinks (including Gigabit) to connect your 3300's to the 4000, and increase your backplane to handle the load that your OfficeConnect doesn't appear to be powerful enough for (all I could find for backplane info was a high of 200Mb/s).

Looks like your OfficeConnect central switch is your bottleneck:)

Hope this helps :)

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