Nortel 5650TD and teamed NIC's on a Dell RX720

[barneytolsta]

Good morning,

New to the forum so please be gentle

We have a new backup server in our DR site the a fore mentioned RX720.  We have a 20GB fibre link between HQ and DR terminating on the 5650TD's.  Our backup's are going to be done in the DR site now so its all about bandwidth.  We are pulling the data from 5 VM hosts in HQ so in theory with have 5GB of traffic hitting the fibre link.  We would like to present that traffic the biggest pipe we can onto the backup server as that is the bottleneck in our design.  The server has a quad port broadcom netextreme card installed in it and we can team the nics together using the BACS software.  We have done this for testing with two interfaces and it does give us 2GB of bandwidth out from the sever but on 1GB into it. 

The switch is configured right now for LACP on the two ports the server and also on the NICS.  I am basically looking for a way to get the maximum bandwidth into that server.  What i keep reading which is true that because of the hash the traffic uses one of the links so getting the full 2GB can be a pipe dream.  Any advice will be excellent?

Thanks in advance

Graham

[Michael McNamara]

You are essentially correct.... bonding with LACP (802.3ad) will provide you the ability to load-balancing multiple conversations over the multiple links. If you only have a single conversation (server -> backup device) then that conversation will only traverse a single link/path.

You would need to upgrade to 10GE if you wanted more bandwidth for a single conversation.