I just started at a small 100 employee company that is very dated from a network and infrascructure standpoint. I plan on implementing a low cost iscsi san for backup/DR/File share and host for VM's. My current switch's are old dell layer 2 managed 10/100 switches. I am wondering I can get away with purchasing just one Managed gigabit switch (layer 2 or 3) and use that switch for the servers and iscsi san and connect the current switch gear to it as well. Would this create a gigabit backbone for the server and san traffic and help speed up my network for little cost?
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Thats a great point. My proposed network would speed up the servers and iscsi san, but woulld actually slow down all the clients as they would bottle neck through the single link back to the gigabit switch. Could I get away with using the a single managed gigabit switch for the servers and use some cheap unmanaged switches for clients? Or should I just push for the $ to upgrade all the switches at once to at least layer 2 managed gigabit?
This will really depend on your performance needs. I have a similar bottleneck on a few switches, however there isn't a need (or rather a need to spend the money) for the Gigabit connectivity yet. You can always phase in new switches as the need and budget allows. Keep in mind, if performance is slow, clients don't blame the switches! :)
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by: lpackerPosted on 2009-03-03 at 08:52:12ID: 23785611
There is a yes and no anwser to this. The new switch (used for SAN and Server access) would have Gigabit access (see Note at bottom) however, the older switches would only have 10/100 access to the network. This would also include the uplinks between the 2 older switches. This means that all clients on each of the old switches will share a single 10/100 link back to the New Switch which connects your SAN and Servers.
Note: I have not configured a Dell switch howver I am familiar with Cisco. I have a Cisco 4510 with several Gigabit blade switches. Even though each port has the ability of Gigabit bandwidth, each set of 8 ports is limited to 1 Gigabit bandwidth. I do not know if this true for the switch you will purchase.