Multiport network adapters

sinister_stu · 26 Jul 2006 at 11:45

I've been looking for a NIC with multiple gigabit ethernet ports but have so far only been able to find ones for MACs. I would have thought that they're available for PCs as well but alas no joy thus far.

Not especially bothered if it's PCI, PCI-X or PCI-e but does anyone know of a manufacturer who makes them?

sinister_stu · 27 Jul 2006 at 09:40

Excellent, cheers for the suggestions, now to find someone who sells them...

sinister_stu · 27 Jul 2006 at 11:15

Intel Pro/1000 MT Quad port - £1362 :eek:

maybe a bit pricey for my needs!
Also seems to have far more functionality than I require, any more ideas? I just want a simple 4 port Gigabit adapter. How hard can it be?

sinister_stu · 27 Jul 2006 at 15:10

Andre said:
If you want four ports, why not connect a switch up to a single port on the machine?

It is only if you want different subnets that you would need four distinct ports

I want to use link aggregation in order to increase the bandwidth of the link. The situation I have is multiple slave PCs sending information to a master PC via gigabit ethernet through a switch. Link aggregation will be used between the switch and the master PC. From what I gather, I require a switch supporting it then a network adapter for each cable coming from the switch. It is cheaper to buy a switch capable of LA then to buy a network adapter which supports it, so I was looking for a basic multiport adapter to save on PCI slots.

sinister_stu · 27 Jul 2006 at 16:54

bigredshark said:
well, I think you're crazy really, I've set up exchange clusters for thousands of users and none of the servers have more than 2 NIC ports teamed for any one purpose. unless it's a *really* big server it won't be able to process the data and even if it could a PCI slot can't do unblocked bandwidth for even a single gigabit port so it doesn't matter.

if you have these requirements then it's because you're server architecture isn't well designed.

yes, the intel 4 port card is expensive but not that much for enterprise user, if you can't afford it you don't need it. why not just use 2 or more cards and team across them anyway, it doesn't need to be on the same card. and also if i understand what you're doing then you'll need a managed gig switch supporting etherchannel (a cisco 2970G would be my choice).

I'd think carefully about your requirements as you simply don't need 4 gig interfaces on a machine...

The application I want to use this for is not as you describe. As I pointed out previously, the slave PCs are all passing data to the master PC. For the next systems being designed we have found that the bandwidth of the Gigabit ethernet conection to the master PC is all being used up, causing sporadic erroneous behaviour. Therefore I have been looking in some kind of link aggregation in order to boost the bandwidth available on the stretch between switch and master PC.

sinister_stu · 28 Jul 2006 at 09:19

Thanks for the information bigredshark, I'm not particularly knowledgeable in this field so help is appreciated.

The information coming in is images, which are then searched with a very fast algorithm in order to find particular patterns, so a reasonably modest PC can be used for the master. Not all of the images are displayed due to bandwidth limitations, this, amongst other things, is what I am trying to achieve.

In any case, PCI-X network adapters are currently used for the reasons you stated.