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New cables
the head of corp IT goes over my head and emails my boss that I've got the building cabled all wrong and it is slowing response times
according to him all cables should go back to the server room and plug into switches there
I have switches in some rooms and then one cable goes to the server room
since none of the switches are larger than 24 port it seems to me that at some point all the signals from switch are going to be forced to run through one cable whether it is in a 'remote' room or the server room
all servers are in the same switch
all other switches have a cable that goes directly to that switch
to me that is as good as it gets

am I wrong?

A
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New define wrong
was the cabling planned or ad hoc. If ad hoc then draw and document the network. If a switch is within 2 feet of another switch or 50 ft away it really doesnt matter. Gather some metrics on your network you might discover a bottleneck or a failing port on a switch.. The one I like to use is a 6 inch cable and a 2 foot cable and ask the person who said you did it wrong to scientifically explain the difference as to why the shorter cable is faster.
good luck,
daemon
that way too many Iraqis conceived of free society as little more than a mosh pit with grenades. ANDISHEH NOURAEE
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New the corp guy is wrong
Ours are distributed as well and we have no issues with slow response time. Switches are set up in the computer room for the office area and 4 different areas to cover the production floor. The switches on the floor are connected to the computer room via gigabit fiber. Our phone system is IP based as well, so it's not just computer traffic.
Darrell Spice, Jr.                      [link|http://www.spiceware.org/cgi-bin/spa.pl?album=./Artistic%20Overpass|Artistic Overpass]\n[link|http://www.spiceware.org/|SpiceWare] - We don't do Windows, it's too much of a chore
New Re: cables
It appears from the description you have several servers each with a cable to a switch in the server room. What speed those connections are is the main thing to look at.

If a room with it's own switch does transactions mainly with just one of the servers, performance isn't going to be improved (and cabling costs will be greatly increased) by wiring directly to the switch the servers are on - unless the server connection to that switch is a gigabit or 10-gigabit connection and the cable run to the server room is 100-Mbs.

If the rooms do heavy access to multiple servers (or if the server connection at it's switch is 1-Gigabit or higher), then separate cables to the switch the servers are on will be faster, depending on traffic density.

If the switch serving the room connections is peripheral, NOT the one the servers go to, then you're back to the single cable situation you have now - no difference whatever except much higher cabling cost - unless the server switch is a gigabit switch and the connections to the peripheral servers are gigabit connections - then it would be faster than 100-Mbs connections to the room switches.

If the traffic density is low, it doesn't make one bit of difference how you do it, but if you're doing intense work against an Oracle server or something like that optimization is worthwhile.

Even so, I'd recommend local switches with a single gigabit connection each back to a gigabit switch at the servers to minimize cabling expense - but if the server room peripheral switches aren't gigabit to the server switch and servers, you're just spinning your wheels to do anything different.

Cabling is expensive and difficult to move around for M&A (moves and adds), so you don't want to incur cable expense unless it's really worthwhile.
[link|http://www.aaxnet.com|AAx]
New Thanks, but a few questions
Servers have gigabit cards but 100 Base T switch
all clients have 100 Base T cards

No room is hitting a particular server (Citrix farm)

Please details how gigabit switches might help
all I can see is that the network can't go faster than 100 Base T

A
Play I Some Music w/ Papa Andy
Saturday 8 PM - 11 PM ET
All Night Rewind 11 PM - 5 PM
Reggae, African and Caribbean Music
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New cant go faster than the cards on the servers
that way too many Iraqis conceived of free society as little more than a mosh pit with grenades. ANDISHEH NOURAEE
clearwater highschool marching band [link|http://www.chstornadoband.org/|http://www.chstornadoband.org/]
New Draw a picture
Post it.
New Hubs, you'd be right.
Switches separate the traffic so each port sees only it's own traffic, not all traffic as with hubs (switches are just fast multi-port bridges).

If you have a gigabit leg between a server and a switch, that cable pools all traffic coming from all legs to that switch. If your switch had 10 100-Meg ports and one gigabit port to the server (which must, of course, have a gigabit card), you'd have to saturate all 10 100-Mbs ports with traffic for that server to saturate the gigabit leg, If the leg to the server is 100-Mbs it will be easily saturated and the legs out of the switch will be unable to achieve anything near 100-Mbs because there's a bottleneck at the server.

If you have peripheral switches feeding into a main switch with the servers on it, the legs to the peripheral switches must be gigabit also or you have serious bottlenecks between the switches.

My default would be a gigabit switch with the servers and peripheral switches connected to it all through gigabit ports, and the peripheral switches would have 100-Mbs ports facing the workstations. Of course, I'd try to push those peripheral switches out to the workgroups if possible to cut down the cost of pulling cable.

If all your switches are 100-Mbs on all ports, including the server ports, rewiring is highly unlikely to give you much of a performance boost.

[link|http://www.aaxnet.com|AAx]
New Re: Hubs, you'd be right.
thnaks
Corp IT also raised this point but I didn't get it

A
Play I Some Music w/ Papa Andy
Saturday 8 PM - 11 PM ET
All Night Rewind 11 PM - 5 PM
Reggae, African and Caribbean Music
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New Check for loops in your network
These can kick your entire network's performance in the goolies.


Peter
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     cables - (andread) - (9)
         define wrong - (daemon)
         the corp guy is wrong - (SpiceWare)
         Re: cables - (Andrew Grygus) - (5)
             Thanks, but a few questions - (andread) - (4)
                 cant go faster than the cards on the servers -NT - (daemon)
                 Draw a picture - (broomberg)
                 Hubs, you'd be right. - (Andrew Grygus) - (1)
                     Re: Hubs, you'd be right. - (andread)
         Check for loops in your network - (pwhysall)

I just know what I read in the magazines.
78 ms