MULTI NIC VS MULTIPLE NICS

[solidussnake]

Without luck i've been trying to find out what is better setting up a computer to route all information and serve as a higher performance router and i have been researching the use of NICS that have multiple controllers and pciE interface each being gigabit or the use of seperate Network cards. Then also the i've been considering having that computer a pure firewall also. I am trying to reshape for performance and also better managment when the average 10-15 computers are online (3 are xbox 360s). I've seen some answers but all are conflicting with each other reguarding performance. Can anyone help?

 

[Kewlx25]

I'm confused. What's the server doing? What are you doing that would require a server to have multiple gig cards? Are your "client" computers connecting through the server to access the internet?

 

[solidussnake]

I have multiple internet Service Providers in the home both being 20Mbps on with a 2Mbps upload and the other 1 Mbps upload. When one service is not being utilized i would like to have software hardware to merge the speeds of the internet together and redistribute the speed to other devices not being used and there are other devices to hook up to the network as well that are not regularly used. Most the client desktops on the network already have some performance increases as of the have NICs with onboard NPC's but to futher boost performance and also monitor all network traffic and packets i would like to use a dedicated computer as a server if possible. Now i lack in performance sometimes even for a single xbox 360. Now i am using a Linksys WRT160N and it has done a poor job.

 

[solidussnake]

Without luck i've been trying to find out what is better setting up a computer to route all information and serve as a higher performance router and i have been researching the use of NICS that have multiple controllers and pciE interface each being gigabit or the use of seperate Network cards. Then also the i've been considering having that computer a pure firewall also. I am trying to reshape for performance and also better managment when the average 10-15 computers are online (3 are xbox 360s). I've seen some answers but all are conflicting with each other reguarding performance. Can anyone help?

If the internet merging is eaily possible what is a good server OS to handle that without adding alot of network performance loss

 

[Kewlx25]

Running Linux in a VM on your server would work. I'm sure there's some "load balancing" software out there for linux to do this. Otherwise, this isn't an easy "drop in".

 

[solidussnake]

I'm confused. What's the server doing? What are you doing that would require a server to have multiple gig cards? Are your "client" computers connecting through the server to access the internet?

Yes i am hoping to use it as a hardware firewall/router/net storage device. And I am still not sure which configuration would out perform the single pci express multi lan (all ports with own network controller) or multiple nics, or an outside switch all being gigabit I found several cheap gigabit multiport nics too most are expensive but i was going to try them if they will make the network perform better

 

[Kewlx25]

depends on how fast this machine is going to be.

Typically, you could hook one NIC directly to your Cable/DSL modem, and the other Gig-nic to your gigabit switch. with your server having a connecting to the gig switch and all the clients also, you can now host internet and file sharing over the gig-nic.

Gigabit NIC is good for about 100+MB/sec both direction, so 200MB/sec total.

If you got a multi-NIC card and bound the ports, you'd have to get a semi-managed switch that could support this, which will add a lot to your cost.