Core Switch capacity issue

[edsa]

Hi

 

We currently use a HP Procurve 4108gl for our core switch. I only have 1 available gig port vacant on the switch, but I would like to provide at least another 6 dedicated Gig links. Is it possible to use the 1 vacant port as an uplink to another device that will provide a whole gig link or will this method only provide a fraction of the gig speed.

 

My initial thoughts were to uplink from the vacant gig port on the 4108gl to another HP gig switch.

 

I would appreciate any recommendations as we cannot afford to change our core switch this year.

 

ta

[FN-GM]

Yep that should be fine. You might need a crossover cable to connect the two switches.

 

Z

[Ex-MGSTech]

Are you sure about that? a 1gig pipe will only ever allow 1gig down it?

 

daisy chaining it to another gig switch will devide the 1gig by however many ports are on the new one?

 

Are we talking 1gig copper or 1 gig fibre?

 

I'm in an almost identical situation with our 4108 in that i want to link up a new building with circa 90 PC's, a single fibre connection (all I have left in the chassis) will only support around 50 clients.

All i can do is look at a 5400 12 bay chassis, however none of the modules are transferable and I'm looking at £8k for the new one!! :-(

 

Steve

[SYNACK]

If you patch another switch in via a single 1GB link the clients that link to this external switch will only be able to use up to the 1GB speed of the core port between them. If they are all sending data at once this will limit them to a theoretical 167MBits/s the likelihood of all the stations needing that much data all at the same time is remote though.

 

If these links are going to be catering for lots of traffic then I would suggest kicking off a few extra hosts from your core switch and trunking (teaming) four ports from your core to the secondary switch. This would give 9 links 4GB to share which works out at a much more healthy 444MBits of bandwidth each.

 

This setup does require your secondary switch to be managed in order to support teaming of the links.

[edsa]

thank you all for your advice