On Thu, 3 Jun 1999, Richard L. Rhodes wrote:

1. In setting up a NetApp, is it better to use one big/wide

connection (say gigabit ethernet) as opposed to a bunch of narrow connections (say, 4 100mbps ethernet in a etherchannel). (Note that for this discussion I'm ignoring the redundancy in a etherchannel.)

This depends completely on the networking hardware you have. Obviously with gigabit you get a bigger pipe and it could all be connected to one box, but do you have networking equipment that takes advantage of it. The same is true for etherchannel, you have to have a switch that is capable of etherchannel, a simple hub will not do, but you already knew this. Secondly, trunking gives you more flexibility, if at some point you want to split your network into two in order to make it more redundant you can do it very easily with etherchannel. Put 2 interfaces on this net, 1 on this and another one on this. Etherchannel also helps you in case of disaster recovery. If your networking is gone you simply disable it, buy a $20 hub from a local store and you're ready. It will be slow, but at least you'll have access to it. The other downside to NAC's implementation of trunking is that it will not give you all of trunked bandwith to one system. You will only be able to use 1 interface per IP. In the end the choice really depends on your environment (net hardware, money, availability of hardware, your topology, type of use, etc. ).

2. On a Unix system that will be doing heavy NFS work to a NetApp,

is it better to use separate mounts on separate but smaller ethernet connections (100mbps ethernet), or, run all mounts through one wide ethernet connection (gigabit ethernet)?

If you'll only have 1 or 2 systems connected to your NAC, etherchannel is NOT the way to go. Etherchannel as implemented by NAC works well only in large environments where statistical factors come into play.

Specifically, I'm going to be setting up an Oracle DB on a NetApp. I'm looking at whether I would be better off using multiple 100mbps ethernets or one gigabit ethernet connection.

If you'll use the NAC to replace a locally attached disk go with gigabit. If you'll have a farm of 200 database servers all using the same NAC for their storage go with etherchannel.

Tom