difference between switching & routng

A router passes packets by looking up the destination in its routing table of an incoming packet. If the destination does not exist the packet is dropped or sent out the default route depending on the configuration of the router. Routers work at layer 3 of the OSI model moveing packets based on the L3 address - ie. IP address, IPX address, etc.

A switch passes packets by looking up the MAC address of the destination in it's MAC table. If the MAC address does not exist in the table, it isflooded down all switch ports.

There are switches that do layer three routing. You create a VLAN that separates ports on the switch into different subnets, you assign an IP to the VLAN, then you route between the VLANS.

But a "layer 3" switchis a switch with a router inside. On these very same devices, they refer to either "routing" or "bridging" across ports.

It all depends on your configuration; but if all is working correctly, I would suspect that the noticable differential (ofconnecting your db server directly to the routing switch you have) would be neligable.

I would say that we are not using the router to divide the network, We are only connecting the switches to it, my friend told me that connecting the db to the switch will make a bottleneck on the server, and it will not be able to serve clients as it was.

Again, it all depends on the configuration.

Are you adding switches at this time? And wanting to know how the db server will be affected? If that's the case, and the db sever operates fine directly off of the router, I would not move it -- unless you have to.

The switches will learn paths... but yes, it could be a bottleneck depending on switch memory and quantity of info it has to pass though, it depends on qty of nodes and what those nodes are doing thoughout the day as well.

Is this an outside DB Server (IIS/SQL ?) or is it internal? If internal, then there will probably be little impact by moving it to the switch. If outside users come into this DB, then the switch will probably slow things down a bit... but I doubt that your users will notice anything. Even if they come in on T1 or T3's... the speed differential should not be noticable.

Switches are inherently faster than routers. Switches are layer two devices and require less packet inspection that layer three devices. Switches make use of different ASICS that speed throughput. L3 switches make use of the L2 ASICs and are therefore faster than a similar router.

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