Re: Switch/Router speed issues w/power 7 & V7.1

[DrFranken <midrange@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Not terribly likely.  Since POWER5 we've been dealing primarily with GbE 
network connections. If your current network is all 10Mb then yes you'll 
be needing to put a few bucks into that but I don't have a single 
customer still running that slow and can't think of many that aren't at 
GbE speeds already.

Do remember that for MOST IBM i Installations the actual amount of data 
going in and out of the Ethernet lines isn't really very much. This is 
due to the fact that most applications AND their data are both inside 
the machine. As a consequence we send in 'requests' resulting in 
programs running against data and then receive 'answers'.  The request 
often is in the under 1000 bytes range (1 Ethernet packet) while the 
response can also be that size at least in 5250 land. Web traffic of 
course is higher.  When I look at traffic graphs for the Network 
connections on virtually every machine I work on, the traffic graph is a 
near flat line just above, but not much above, zero.

So while a good healthy network *IS* important, unless you know your 
application will be sending 10's of MB of data on a frequent basis your 
basic GbE switch will have no problem with POWER7.

    - Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

On 3/29/2011 6:56 AM, Don Cavaiani wrote:
> Did someone just recently mention that switches and routers may have to
> be upgraded to match the speed of the power 7?