On Sat, 10 Sep 2005 23:08:32 GMT, "DanR" <dhr22@sorrynospm.com> wrote:

>Yes, I should have provided more information about our network hardware. Problem
>is I don't really know.

Fine. However you should have some clue who's got performance
problems.

>We are a production company with 6 Avid sweets, 2 audio
>sweets, one online editing room and an interactive department.

That's Suite's, not sweets.

>We don't have any
>IT people per se... but have designated one of our coders to be responsible for
>the network.

I can't tell for sure but if you have 50 boxes, you really should get
someone qualified to do the troubleshooting. It's easy enough to plan
and setup a new network. It's requires experience to troubleshoot an
existing network.

>He's a sharp guy and seems to know his network jargon. And he is
>new on the job having taken over the network from someone who left. Because I'm
>fairly handy with computers in general

Well, ok.

>I'm helping the boss think through our
>move to giga-bit and the coincidental network / Internet slowdown we have been
>experiencing.

Ok, so it's an *INTERNET* slowdown, not a server to client or render
farm slowdown. That's not going to change at all by going to gigabit.
You're bottlenecked at 1.5Mbits/sec at the T1 and that's your limit.
Do the traffic monitoring to see what and how much is moving in and
out of the T1. Don't be surprised if you see worms, file sharing, and
garbage.

>The main reason to go giga-bit is to move very large files around
>on the network. (video files in the giga-Bytes) And because of the Internet
>slowdown of late we are talking and wondering if that will improve Internet
>throughput.

That's very different from an *INTERNET* slowdown. Most render farms
are interconnected with gigabit ethernet. The big boxes have multiple
gigabit cards to distribute the load. I got to play with one RAID
server with 4 cards and a load balancer. Yeah, for in house traffic,
gigabit is great.

However, you still have to know if you're making an improvement. For
that you need numbers, measurements, calculations, and pretty graphs
to impress the boss. I suggest MRTG for traffic monitoring.

>Obviously it will be a fairly expensive endeavor to run all new
>cable throughout the building and get new NICs.

Baloney. CAT5e will do gigabit just fine. You don't really need
CAT6. Keep the cable lengths down to less than 300ft. Avoid long
flexible ethernet CAT5 jumpers. Borrow a cable certifier and test
your wiring. New gigabit NIC's are cheap. Netgear GA311 is about
$20. I recently upgraded a law office with gigabit everything. It
was a barely noticeable improvement. You only notice an improvement
if your existing 100baseTX system is saturated. Do the measurements
and you'll know for sure. If lazy, use Windoze XP Perfmon to check
client network utilization.

>So we're also thinking about
>only doing new giga-drops at some work stations and not the entire network.

Fine. Draw the topology map as I suggested and see how many boxes in
between the gigabit NIC's need to be upgraded.

>All
>new drops will be home runs and if we do the entire building that means all home
>runs.

Home runs to what? I smell a big building with cable lengths more
than 300ft which will require some intermediate boxes. Home runs
aren't always best.

>But there's a but and that is that we are considering fiber to the upper
>floor because of long runs.

How long? If you don't know, guess.

>So that is a bit of background and I'm just trying to learn what I can so I can
>ask intelligent questions and better understand what the heck is going on.

Well, ok. I think I've given you a good start on the buzzwords. So
far, you've made the decision to spend some money, considerable time,
and a bit of guesswork, in order to upgrade a network that you don't
have a clue where it's running slow, why it's running slow, or whether
you have a traffic problem. Also, this has nothing to do with
wireless so you're asking in the wrong newsgroup. To insure that
you'll get no useful answers, you've supplied not one single name,
number, model number, distance, or accurate description.

>I'm
>basically a home network guy and that is the extent of my network hardware
>knowledge.

Well, you're learning. Business LAN's are very similar except that
reliability is a much bigger issue than performance or features. Your
real task will be to fix whatever problem you can't seem to describe
accurately, and do it without breaking anything else or having 50
irate graphic artists screaming at you. That's quite different from
home networking.

>I appreciate the help so far provided. Thank you all.
>Jeff... when you say "A T1 (DS1) is 1.544Mbits/sec. You'll get about
>1.3Mbits/sec thruput in both directions." Does that mean that just one
>workstation at a time will see that throughput?

No. The bandwidth is distributed roughly equally among the
workstations.

>If 10 computers / workstations
>are at the same time doing a Microsoft update for example... are they sharing
>that 1.3Mbit bandwidth?

Yes. In theory, each workstation will get 1/10th the incoming
bandwidth. MS Update is a bad example because of the way they do
bandwidth limiting, but that's a diversion and not part of this
discussion.

>Are they each then downloading at 130Kb. Does it work
>that way?

Yes.

>Also curious about one of our people who constantly listens to
>Internet radio streams. Any harm there?

No. I do that in the office. Screaming audio is from 24Kbits/sec to
about 128Kbits/sec. Compared to your 1500Kbit/sec, the screaming
audio listener only eats about 8% of your incoming bandwidth.
However, if you're saturating the T1 with other traffic (do the
sniffing), then that last 8% might be fatal.


--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@comix.santa-cruz.ca.us
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558