Establishing a network bond: is a switch a bottleneck?
 

I'm planning to synchronize 2 severs with a lot of data. I have a few 1Gbit NIC's in a cardboard box doing nothing so I was thinking of using them to bond 2 or more NIC's together.

Won't the switch be a bottleneck in between the 2 servers?

I don't think so but I'm a little afraid of trying it out and putting the cables in place and then finding out a switch is a bottleneck if you try to bond 2 or more NIC's.

Thanks a lot.

Wannes

Since a switch is designed to handle multiple connections it shouldn't be "the" bottleneck. However, if you are using something like a home based 4 port switch that has limited bandwidth to your DSL or Cable modem bonding isn't going to help you much because you'll still be limited to that link's bandwidth.

However, in a typical data center, bonding can help because the backbone is capable of much more.

Also, there are other bonding modes that have nothing to do with speed but rather stability We use bonding for two NICs so that if one NIC or port on the switch goes down we still have an interconnect for our cluster because the other one is still up. Interestingly this is for Oracle RAC cluster and the bonded NICs go through a switch port because crossover cables between the hosts (which would have been easy for us) don't have enough latency so can cause a problem.

It would be best to go nic to nic. Use a dedicated nic on each server for this task.