Trunking as you refer to it is bonding and typical network speed is
increased not 2x but 1.5x real world performance.  Also, an LTO3 drive
supposedly can do around 80MB/s, so unless you get one of the fastest
PCI-X cards or PCI-E 8X/16X then you may max out the I/O of the
board's interface.

A better idea is more media servers with one or two drives on each one.


On 5/10/06, Dean <dean.deano AT gmail DOT com> wrote:
>
> Hi there.
>
> Does anyone have any real world experience with using Redhat as a Media
> Server, with a quad port Gigabit NIC, using some kind of trunking on the
> NIC? I'm trying to design a Media Server that will be able to receive data
> quickly enough over IP to push a couple of fast tape drives, like LTO3. I'd
> like to be able to reliably get 200 MB/s or more from the network.
>
> I guess my questions are, is this realistic? And, how is the trunking done?
> In the switch, or is Linux able to do it, like Solaris?
>
> Thanks in advance for any insight.
>