Migrating to a gigabit LAN

[bhhouston]

Currently, our LAN configuration consists of 2 PIX 515E's, a LocalDirector 417, and a number of Catalyst 2950 switches. All of the servers (web, app and db) inside our DMZ have gigabit NIC cards and we are wanting to take advantage of that.

Questions:

What products would I need to migrate the LAN to gigabit speed? (My research leads me to the 3560 series switches, PIX 535's and the CSS11503 for load balancing)

What advantages would I gain through a gigabit LAN, both for communication between servers and for outside users accessing my web/app servers?

Are there any disadvantages to moving to a gigabit LAN?

Am I missing anything?

Thanks in advance,

Ben

[lgijssel]

Your pix515's will probably still do the job as I do not think that you are going to upgrade your Internet bandwidth to something over 100Mb. With these systems remaining in place you will not create a large bottleneck. Perhaps only for the DMZ?

You will benefit most from Gigabit when you upgrade your servers and clients on the LAN.

Check that all servers are capable of internally handling Gigabit (disks, bus etc)

Cisco 3560 or 3750 series are well suited for your goal.

Regards,

Leo

[mostiguy]

Have you done any bandwidth monitoring to determine if there is any need? You could set up MRTG to create graphs of the interface utilization of the PIX, which would help you figure out if the 100 megabit interfaces on the 515 are a bottleneck between the DMZ and inside segments. You also could set up MRTG to actually monitor each port on the 2950s, but that would likely be a bit more work.

Depending of what operating system your servers are running, there are a variety of ways to monitor bandwidth utilization. If they support SNMP, you could also set up MRTG to chart their utilization. If Windows nt/2k/xp/2003, you could use performance monitor to view network utilization