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i am in the need of buying a rack server which will serve static video files to users. Each video file will be between 30MB and 50MB and we expect up to 16k concurrent users. I was looking for servers and i found some nice ones from HP and DELL but i am kinda lost when looking at the network card specs. I know that i will need about 2000Mbit uplink but i cant figure out how to read that out from the network card specs. And what the important values are.

Lets take this one: Broadcom® NetXtreme II 57710 Single Port 10GBase-T NIC with TOE and iSCSI Offload, PCIe-8

What does 10Gbase mean? 10Gbit? 10Gbyte?

Well, maybe someone can enlighten me a bit :-)

P.S. The servers (approx. 5) will be placed in a huge server farm, so the bottleneck will definitly be my own hardware ;-)

P.S. OS - CentOS , NginX web server

g4mm4
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  • You will need to make sure your upstream switch(es) supports 10G connectivity. – Keith Stokes Jul 14 '12 at 13:32
  • I didn't -1 you, but you probably received a -1 because it's very easy to look up what 10GBase-T means on your own, and also because you ask an unanswerable question when you say `"Should i go for single port or dual port?"`. Please take a moment to read the [faq] and [ask]. This is an amazing community and I hope you continue to be a part of it, but it isn't a traditional discussion forum and you should only ask answerable questions that are not discussion oriented after you've done research yourself. – MDMarra Jul 14 '12 at 13:33
  • i understand. :-) but it would be nice if the -1 voter would explain why. – g4mm4 Jul 14 '12 at 13:41
  • No idea who downvoted you but don't let it worry you, wait until you understand serverfault more, it's entirely irrelevant - the site's about getting help and offering it back, focus on that and rep just comes and you don't worry about downvotes ok. – Chopper3 Jul 14 '12 at 15:22

1 Answers1

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What does 10Gbase mean? 10Gbit? 10Gbyte?

You're reading only part of it. It's 10GBase-T. Let's break it down.

  • 10G - this means it's a 10Gbps card
  • Base - this means that it is a baseband transmission (standard stuff)
  • T - this means that the signal is carried over twisted pair cabling. You should use CAT 6A for this.

Should i go for single port or dual port? Dual port is more cpu heavy probably?

Do you want redundancy through teaming/bonding? Do you need an aggregate of 20Gbps? The answers to these questions should answer your question. No one else can answer this for you. Obviously a second active NIC will have slightly more overhead, but in the grand scheme of things, it's not a lot.

MDMarra
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  • Hey thanks a lot MDmarra. Top Answer. Still a lot of open questions like. So 10Gbps means 10240 MBit p sec. I think the card is more than suitable to serve 2000 uplink right? I am really a noob in this area, sorry for asking dump questions. – g4mm4 Jul 14 '12 at 13:10
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    10Gbps is 10 gigabits per second. If you have a requirement of 2000Mbps (which is another way of writing 2Gbps) then yes. You have plenty of overhead. Please note the difference between bit and byte here. – MDMarra Jul 14 '12 at 13:15