file server question

[Michael Gerdts]

On Mon, May 14, 2001 at 02:49:32PM +0200, Lajber Zoltan wrote:
> Our expectation is about an Ultra Enterprise 450, or a Fire 3800.
> Becouse the 5 VLANs, I prefering a quad fast ethernet NIC for load
> balancing, but a single gigabit interface possible, if it's better. 

I would highly recommend going with Gigabit.  Not only do you get more
throughput, but your network latency can be cut to 1/10 th of what you see
with 100 Mbit.  Also, Sun is supposed to be coming out with a gigabit NIC
(Sun Gigabit 3.0) in the next couple of months that supports 802.1q (VLAN
tagging).  Thus, you could make it so that you limit the load that you put
on your routers in favor of getting the performance boost that you get from
hardware switching.  Of course, whether this is important depends on your
overall network topology.

With 1500 clients, if you have an outage, how much time can you afford to
be offline?  A 450 is much harder to quickly swap parts than a 3500 or 3800
is.  For the price difference, though, you may want to go with something
like a 420 or 220, then cluster them.  My understanding is that the Veritas
File System Edition is samba-based and integrates with Veritas Cluster.

Mike