Network / Bandwidth bottleneck

[raycheung]

Hi all,

Hope there are some gurus out there who can provide some advice on this.

At the moment we are in a centralised LAN running @10Mbps, where PCs access the DS sever and DB sever locally. There are appoximately 250+ PCs in this LAN, but only about 20+ access the App/DB servers. <location A>

We are planning to move the DS and DB servers to another location 10km away, which will be part of another LAN, @100Mbps <location B>

We have another central networking hub in another location which handles the WAN connections, traffic and monitoring <location X>

From A to X the WAN link is 10Mb

From X to B the WAN link is 100Mb

So my question is: will we (@ location A) experience a significant bandwidth bottleneck with this relocation? Especially on trying to get the data across from the DS/DB servers?

i.e.

A <-------------------- X <--------------------- B
10Mbps 100Mbps

We have done some tests by moving a PC to location B and connect to the DS/DB servers at location A...performance is similar to the LAN enviroment, which would make sense because we can only get a max. throughput of 10Mbps.

A --------------------> X ---------------------> B
10Mbps 100Mbps

If you provide any help/advice that would be much appreciated. I know there is a few options for us already, such as creating a replica DS/DB environment at B, TS or Citrix...but I was wondering if there is anyone out there who had a similar scenario?

Cheers

Ray

[ray.wurlod]

Best practice is to have dedicated network segments with different IP addresses from the rest of the LAN between machines. That way you do not experience saturation problems with the rest of the LAN. NICs are not that expensive - maybe a couple of hundred dollars.

[vmcburney]

Your client / server performance should be okay, you may see slower startup and compile times but job development on the client should be okay. Your server - server performance, as Ray suggests, is your major concern. You want data to travel directly from your database server to your ETL server with as few impediments as possible. If you have database lookups in your job any network impediments will significantly slow you down.

[raycheung]

Your client / server performance should be okay, you may see slower startup and compile times but job development on the client should be okay. Your server - server performance, as Ray suggests, is your major concern. You want data to travel directly from your database server to your ETL server with as few impediments as possible. If you have database lookups in your job any network impediments will significantly slow you down.

At the moment, the two servers are connected through a dedicated 100Mb switch. So hypothetically if we replace the swith with a Gigabit switch we would see better performance? (Provide the servers have enough ummph of course...)

[vmcburney]

FTP a very large file from your database server to your datastage server right now and take that as a benchmark. Once they move the servers FTP the same file and complain if its slower! You need to take DataStage out of the equation and just talk to your network guys about bandwidth and throughput of data. Don't confuse them with having to explain what DataStage does or what it needs.

[raycheung]

Will give that a try...thx for the advice guys.