Trunking Network Connection

ace2109 · 26 Mar 2011 at 18:31

Hi Guys,
After some advice i installed 3 extra network cards into our server in the hope it will increase the connection speed and thus increase data transfer speeds between the server and the editing client machine.

What is the best way to go about setting up a trunk? Do i do this on the switch itself? We are using an HP ProCurve switch.

I was also playing about with the bridge connections setting the network control panel but it reduced the speed from 1000mbps to just 100mbps?

Any advice is greatly appreciated as always

ace

ace2109 · 27 Mar 2011 at 10:47

Do the cards need to be same? The three PCI cards i installed are bsic cheap gigbit cards and are different to the onboard Lan.

Is there a good way of testing the connection to see if it actually working?

ace2109 · 27 Mar 2011 at 18:04

I am using the PCI-e port for another card so the NIC's are using PCI.

This is ultimately a test to see weather this will improve the connection between the server and the clients machines. If succesful we will invest in better cards.

The previous plans were to install a fibre card and have the connection between the switch and the server be a fibre connection but after speaking to a few people on here they suggested teaming NIC's would be a cheaper but similar option. Doing it this way also allows for a certain amount of redundancy as well i suppose.

ace2109 · 28 Mar 2011 at 20:23

Current disk configuration has no Raid and is just simple disk shares. This will be changing in the current months ahead.

We have about 7 - 8 clients accessing the server at anyone time all for editing video footage, graphics and other information. The current setup only has 1 network cable connecting the server to the switch and this is were i believe the bottleneck is.

An example would be the following:
An editor using Final Cut cant play to stream of HD Footage at any one time, once it tries to play the second line of footage it just freezes and nothing plays.

If you guys don't believe using LACP will work in increasing network connectivity what other suggestions would you have?

ace2109 · 1 Apr 2011 at 16:39

Our current Server is running Windows Server 2008 with just the drives shared as normal. Each mac connects to it using smb! Am i looking at a re-format to change the file system to NFS?

Our current switch has 2 2gig fibre ports and what i originally wanted to do was put a fibre card in the windows machine and connect it to the switch via fibre as to me it seems as if the bottleneck is the connection between the server and the switch.

I need to find out more about final cut though and the codec etc it is using.

Our new server will be a Mac Pro and this should be arriving in a few weeks time.

All this information is great guys and i really appreciate your help.

ace2109 · 3 Apr 2011 at 22:39

Yes the New Mac Pro will be running OSX Server, our other windows server will also be changed to run Ubuntu as i thought as OSX is unix based it would be better to use the same file system.

ace2109 · 5 Apr 2011 at 21:41

Ok guys what i am going to do is use 4 500gb hard drives and put them into RAID 10 and see what the speed we are getting then from 1 gigabit connection and we can take it from there.

Thanks again for all the support.