I have had good experiences when using Sun e250/450's with QFE's
(Quad-Fast-Ethernet) trunked/channeled together. The QFE's compete very
well with Gig-E Cards. If you have a Cisco switch (or other high quality
switch that supports trunking/channeling) which already has available
100Mbit ports this might be a cheaper solution.
You can also try just adding regular nic ports to the media server(s) and
directing different clients to different ports.
I haven't done the benchmarking, but Gig-E is more CPU intensive, so a
single cpu media server might be better served by a QFE card.
_I_ tend to think that the network is always the bottleneck... (assuming you
have beefy media servers - plenty of cpu/memory/underload-scsi_busses)
I have also heard that putting standard PCI cards in to the 64-bit slots of
servers is a good thing since there is more bandwidth internally behind the
64-bit slot than normal slots.
Good Luck.
-A.S.
-----Original Message-----
From: veritas-bu-admin AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
[mailto:veritas-bu-admin AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu]On Behalf Of Andrew
Shinkarev
Sent: Thursday, November 01, 2001 2:57 PM
To: Ryn
Cc: Veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] DLT and media server concern
On Thu, Nov 01, 2001 at 09:26:23AM -0500, Ryn wrote:
Ryan,
220R with 450 Mhz single CPU, 512Mb and Sun GE card.
In average it gives us 150Mb/s which is
good only for 2 DLT8000 if you don't compress data
on clients.
Didn't play with tunnings much but in Curtis book I found something
interesting about this. pp 663 First edition.
E10k and 420 with 4 CPUs gave 200Mb/s in average between of them.
In your situation you probably can use jumbo frames which should
fix the problem.
I am thinking to use Ultra 5( or Sun Blade 100 ) as media servers with
100Mb/s
switched ethernet. Even with 10k$ per media server license from Veritas
it needs less money for infrastucture.
Sun GE card is 64-bit PCI and needs something like 220/250/280/420/450....
and all these would do nothing during a day. I don't need to mention
GE cost above 2000$ from Sun.
I am serious to start using Linux boxes as Media Servers.
I think I heard about Linux Media Server supported in 3.4.1
No expirience however.
Thanks.
>
> I am trying to devise a solution to backup 1.5 terabytes of data each
night.
> What solutions
> are most of the folks on the list using for similar configurations? We are
> debating sticking
> in a switched gigabit ethernet network, two media servers and four DLT8000
> drives per
> media server. The media servers will be Sun 220/420/250/450/280s. Has
anyone
> devised
> a similar solution? By any chance does anyone have throughput figures from
the
> 220/420/250/450?
> I am curious how many drives it will take to saturate the bus. Also, are
there
> any calculations
> that need to be done to determine RAM/CPUs per system???
>
> Thanks for any suggestions/thoughts/past experiences.
>
> - Ryan
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
> http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu
--
----
Andrew Shinkarev
Network Systems Specialist
Abbott Laboratories
(847) 9387559
shinkara AT pprd.abbott DOT com
_______________________________________________
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