Donna Garverick writes:

>i'm going to add on to steve's question.....
>
>why go to a 100bt card?  from what i've been told (from hp), the 10bt
>cards that come with our systems have extra 'smarts' built into them for
>handling network traffic.  this gives me the impression that we're
>probably getting more performance 'bang' for our 'buck'.  obviously
>though, at some point even the extra smarts can't handle all the
>requests....and i'm wondering when you reach that point?

HP's 100BT card  does not operate at 100Mbs,  actual throughput is closer
to 60Mbs, because of I/O backplane bandwidth problems.  It is quite easy to
demonstrate.  Take two 979's or 989 on a subnet by themselves and try
pushing data from one to the other... they max out.

However, I'd still consider a the 100Bt card for several reasons.

First it gives you a second network interface.  I move the DTC's and older
Telnet boxes to the 10Mbs interface on a different network.   Second if you
wish to try network backups, the 10Mbs is too slow... 100Mbs (at 60Mbs) is
somewhat better... , the third reason is that I've seen the HP e3000 drop
user sessions (on a 10Mbs card) when a DBA pushes a copy of a database from
machine x (10Mbs) to machine y (100Mbs).   The 10Mbs bandwidth can be
consumed.  It doesn't happen when you copy 100Mbs to 100Mbs.