In a June 2003 Wired Magazine interview, Martha Stewart said, "Bill Gates' house, for example, is totally out of date now. He built it right before wireless happened. The big tunnels for all his wires - he doesn't need any of that stuff anymore." The article wasn't about networking, or even technology, but I was struck by that statement because it was echoed by several people when I was explaining that I was running many thousands of feet of cable in OSNews' "house of the future." "Is all that cable really necessary now that there's wireless everything?" people said. As much as I respect Martha Stewart's business and design acumen, neither she, nor those people who talked to me, know what they're talking about. When it comes to networking, there's no substitute for a wire, when a wire's available. -- This is the latest entry in our 2008 Article Contest. 
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Member since:2005-08-18
I'm not the one embarrassing myself. Maybe all you guys who talks so much about this need some real world experience? Link aggregation/etherchannel/bonding is great, but in practice you still dont get a dedicated "channel" to every device you talk to. Sure, you could put a hundred NIC's in your server but that's not good design by any stretch of the imagination.
This has nothing to do with gigabit by the way. Everything everyone has mentioned in this thread could be done with good ole ethernet and fastethernet. The main reason you're getting better performance with gigabit NICS is not because they can handle a higher wire speed, it is because the cards have better buffering and interrupt mitigation techniques than what most ethernet/fastethernet cards has.
Gigabit is great but there's going to be some time before it is needed on the endpoints and currently it's mostly useful in the backbone.
Member since:2005-07-06
Don't make assumptions about my experience, you don't know me. My point was you treated the guy like an idiot for suggesting you can increase bandwidth by using technology like etherchannel, which is in widespread use.
Member since:
2005-07-06
Read, understand and stop being an ass, you're embarrassing the real professionals :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_aggregation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EtherChannel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPMP