One or two switches?

100Mbit internet connection.

What would you prefer:

One 1Gbit switch for everything.

or

One 100Mbit switch for external communication, and one 1Gbit switch for
internal communication between the servers.
(The servers are some apache, with share sessions over sharedance and
data over nfs, a mysql-server, and a plb or pound load balancer)

I'm shure the second option is a bit faster, but do you think it's worth
the money?

Dominik Hofer wrote:

> I'm shure the second option is a bit faster, but do you think it's worth
> the money?

Why do you think that?

Dominik Hofer wrote:
> 100Mbit internet connection.
>
> What would you prefer:
>
> One 1Gbit switch for everything.
>
> or
>
> One 100Mbit switch for external communication, and one 1Gbit switch for
> internal communication between the servers.
> (The servers are some apache, with share sessions over sharedance and
> data over nfs, a mysql-server, and a plb or pound load balancer)
>
> I'm shure the second option is a bit faster, but do you think it's worth
> the money?
In my opinion the second solution is more safe than first.
Let's imagine you experience a crash of 1Gb switch ... terrible. All
communication - external and internal - is dead.

Faster is better for internal. Why not setup a 1gb backbone? Watch out
for bottlenecks...

James Knott schrieb:
> Dominik Hofer wrote:
>
>
>>I'm shure the second option is a bit faster, but do you think it's worth
>>the money?
>
>
> Why do you think that?
>

Because for example the webservers can serve the clients from the
internet and exchange data with the other servers at the same time. I
know this is natively possible through tcp packets, but such the load is
spread over two NICs. For example i have really huge backups running at
night, which then wouldn't stress the external switch and NIC.
Besides this, a D-Link 100Mbit unmanaged switch is currently only about
78 Euro, so i thing i'll go with that option (otherwise i would have to
throw the old 100Mbit NICs away anyway)