Would love to hear your opinions on my setup, mainly where i could improve it.

Basically, I'm starting to think that 100mpbs networking is becoming a bottle neck in our office. We now have 30+ pc's and access to our servers is becoming slow, even to the file server that houses nothing but word templates and saved word files, which leads me to believe that it's the number of connections rather than the volume ?. That server is using an Intel PRO 100S server card. The specs are in my sig i just upgraded the drives and ram which made almost no difference, a dual cpu setup is out of the question. Our main server is a dual 1.26ghz PIII-S w/ 2gb of ram and a raid 5 arry based around 3 36gb Seagate 15k drives, running a dual port Intel server nic in a bridged config AFIK (i didn't set that up) and access to that is getting on the slow side during peak times.

I'm running a Snapgear router to handle our DSL connection, it also takes care of DHCP to take some pressure off the servers. I dont have any problems at all with it so i will probably leave it alone.

The switches i'm currently using are fairly basic units based on 3com chips 2x16 port, with an 8 port switch running off one of the uplink ports. Access is slow from computers with a direct connection to the switches and those 7 that share a 100mbps link to the main switches.

I spoken to a few networking "experts" and they all give me different answers. So i have decided to take on the problem myself. I cant spend a fortune so CISCO gear is out, I dont really think i need layer 3 stuff anyway. I was thinking of even going with 2x Netgear FS726 Link. Then installing 4 gigabit modules into using 2 for uplinks beteewn the switchs and the other two to connect to the servers.

I was thinking of using Intel Gigabit cards.

So is this a good plan of attack or should I look at doing something different ? Also if anyone has any suggestions on hardware it would be a great help.

Thanks
FaTs

The first thing you must do is find out where the problem resides rather than assume it is the network or switches.

You can do this by configuring performance logs. They can be accessed from within the Computer Managment MMC. You can log network bytes sent and received along with hundreds of other performance counters. I'd check page file I/O, CPU cycles, Disk queues and I/Os. A good place to start is the MRTG website. Go to my stats page for some samples of what you can do with MRTG. A link is in my sig.

Assuming the lack of performance is found to be network related Gigabit is a solid idea, but still expensive if you either don't do it in stages ...esp' if you haven't been putting in your newer architecture with this type of view in mind.

For an alternative, cheap solution you may want to try load-balancing NIC's as the Intels are very good for this. Ideally you want the cards going through different switching as this not only keeps up performance but can provide you with a bit more fault tolerance. There's plenty of info' out there on such solutions including Intel's own site, which even covers it in reference to specific lines of card if I recall.

Another vote for load balancing, though I am relatively sure you need Advanced server to correctly load balance in Windows 2K. This assuming your running windows on your servers.

Thanks for the replies.

I'll try the performance logging idea, thanks for that ua549.

The servers are running Windows 2000 Advance Server and Windows 2003 Enterprise. So i'll look into load balancing aswell.