Re: 10GB Ethernet Cards

Thank you good Doctor...
I too was wondering what my usage was on my overnight FTP's to our remote DR site (we run Mimix RecoverNow).

looking at the graphs you suggest we are at 1% to 1.5% during the day, but we get up to a whopping 12% during our backup...

What could I do to help increase the percentage?
some change to ftp attributes? changes to the line description?

of course, a lot may depend on our infrastructure, I do know we have 1GB dark fibre connection to the remote site...



On 8/27/2012 8:30 PM, DrFranken wrote:

Sam,

Open IBM i Navigator and then open Management Central. Expand Monitors
and create a new monitor. Add a metric for Ethernet there. Now watch
that and I'm going to bet that the line will appear to match the bottom
of the graph box.

You can also right click on the system name then select 'Monitors' and
then 'Graph History'. In there select "LAN Utilization (Maximum)" and "1
Month" for the dates. Again I expect you'll see a nearly flat line at
the bottom of the graph.

The nature of IBM i with it's data and programs on the same system means
that network traffic just isn't a big problem. Unless you're serving
large FTP files or NFS you're unlikely to see any gain whatever from 10G.

Then it also matters how big your system is. If you only have 8 or 10
drives and one core it's probable that you wouldn't have the ability to
push a 10G adapter much beyond 1G anyway!

- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis.


On 8/27/2012 9:18 PM, Sam_L wrote:

Yes, good question. The network guys are trying to plan replacing old
switches (I think) and I guess the question of the iSeries came up.

How can I measure utilization on the iSeries side? (I suppose it is a
bit much to hope for a WRKACTIP or WRKTCPACT command for network cards?)

The biggest iSeries volume that that goes over the network is Mimix
replication to our remote back up box. That fluctuates wildly depending
on what we are doing in batch, though it generally doesn't take too long
to catch up. I imagine they will try to update that bit of the network
as well.


Sam


On 8/27/2012 7:52 PM, Mike Cunningham wrote:

I don't know costs as we run 3 1GB NICs but a gotcha might be
spending money for no real gain. Are you currently running your
current nics anywhere near 80% utilization? Do you store and send any
large files in some burst method (like sending a 100GB CAD drawing
stored in the IFS). If you are not using the 1GB bandwidth going to
10GB isn't going to get you better performance. And the path to the
requestor would need to be 10GB all along the way.