Uplinking Switches

Hi All,

Scenario - I have Gigabit switch, uplinked to a Gigabit Port on another switch port, and this chain continues for a few more access switches, all Gigabit uplinks.
If there are servers located at the far end of the chain on a 100MBs, does this mean the data access speed acorss the path will always be 100Mbps?

Also if there was a break along the chain and instead of a Gig Uplink, there was only a 100Mbps uplink somewhere in the path, does this mean the data transfer rate would be 100Mbps?

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Comments

Futura

Surely the path is 1Gbit/s but you will only use 10% of the link running at full capacity. What is there are 2x servers running at 100Mbit/s thats 20% of the bandwidth.

control

Hey Futura, Not to sure what you mean.

I was always under the impression ( sure I read somewhere) that the network will run at the slowest link speed, e.g If there are switches running at Gigabit speed and others along the chain at 100Mbps, then any data transfer between the two would only be at 100Mbps.

Might be confusing myself with what's probably a very simple explanation!

iamme4eva

Control - you are right. The slowest link between two points is the maximum rate you can achieve. That's not to say you are guaranteed 100Mbps - if there are other stuff on the network the bandwidth of each link is obviously shared.

Futura

Disagree

Its not the maximum speed you can achieve, only the maximum speed of that segment, Whats the point of having a core stack running at 10Gbit/s if on one of the access layer switches runs at 100Mbit/s that segment is not going to slow the whole core down to the speed of the access layer switch.#

For instance three switches A, B & C,

A to B is 1Gbit/s
B to C is 100Mbit/s

A to B will not slow down to 100Mbit/s because of Switch C.

The device running at 100Mbits/s per sec will just use 10% of the link between A and B

iamme4eva

I agree with that. That wasn't my point - I wasn't very clear, sorry.

A---100Mbps---B

1Gbps

10Mbps

D

While the segment from B-C runs at 1Gbps, if you have a server at A and a server at D and you were transferring data, the maximum end to end speed you would get is 10Mbps - the slowest speed in the link.

The whole network won't slow down, clearly. My point was end to end speed is limited by the slowest link in the path.

Futura

iamme4eva wrote: »

I agree with that. That wasn't my point - I wasn't very clear, sorry.

A---100Mbps---B
1Gbps
C
10Mbps
D

While the segment from B-C runs at 1Gbps, if you have a server at A and a server at D and you were transferring data, the maximum end to end speed you would get is 10Mbps - the slowest speed in the link.

The whole network won't slow down, clearly. My point was end to end speed is limited by the slowest link in the path.

Agreed,

Hello UK friend, Good to see someone posting in the daytime for us!

iamme4eva

Futura wrote: »

Agreed,

Hello UK friend, Good to see someone posting in the daytime for us!

Hey there. Only posting in the daytime when my boss isn't looking!!!

control

Hi Guys,

Both of you confirmed what i thought / read - I think my initial post/explanation was vague..ish! and I feel we've cleared it up here so cheers!

Another UK friend....