I wondered about the corssover cable so I talked to a guy at work who designs some gigabit stuff. You don't need a switch and you don't even need a crossover cable. I straight thru cable will work just fine, gigabit stuff will do the cross over for you. Which is interesting being that it transmits and receives on all 4 pairs at the same time. Fun stuff. Thomas Eibner wrote: > On Tue, Oct 30, 2001 at 03:27:58PM -0600, Paul Rech wrote: > >>I need a high speed network connection between 2 database servers on >>IBM Netfinity servers. >>What are my options and what hardware do I need? >> > > I once did something similar, although I just went with 100Mbit between > the two hosts, that was more than adequate formy purposes. > > >>I was looking to gigabit ethernet first, as I figured it would be the >>cheapest. >>But a sysadmin I know said he wasn't sure but he thought about $4,000 >>for two cards and a switch. >> > > What do you want a switch for? (Unless you want to hook more machines > in later of course). > > >>Is it really that much for gigabit hardware? >>Is gigabit the cheapest alternative? >>What kind of switch is required? >>What's the difference between a switch and a hub? >>What's the actual transfer rate you can achieve? >>1,000,000,000 bits per sec/ 8bits = 125,000,000 bytes per sec >>125,000,000 bytes per sec / reality =~ 20MB/sec I'm guessing. >> > > Transfer-rate all depends on the hardware.. > I've been able to get 800KB/s between 2 10Mbit cards and around 7MB/s > between 2 100Mbit cards, and that wasn't even state of the art hardware. > > -- The more I know, the more I know I don't know. Confused and confusing since 1966. If I had a nickle for every time I knew I was right and spoke up, I could buy a soda, maybe even two.