T9AM   Faster and Faster - Gigabit Ethernet Networks, File Servers, and Users 
Stuart McRobert, Imperial College, London

Who should attend: System and network administrators responsible for designing or upgrading computer networks and file servers supporting a wide variety of applications, along with managers seeking a better understanding of this rapidly advancing technology.

With the increasing speed of CPUs and rising numbers of desktop and laptop systems fully utilizing Fast Ethernet bandwidth, many network backbones and central servers have been left behind with yesteryear's technology. Although the need to upgrade is often well understood, just where do you begin?

This tutorial is intended for people facing just such a challenge and looks at two key areas, high performance networking with Gigabit Ethernet (1000 Mbps) and faster file serving. By the end of this tutorial you should have a sound understanding of both Gigabit Ethernet and ways of providing high performance fileserving for various applications. Key topics include:

Faster Networking    Gigabit Ethernet: What is it? How does it work? The standards    Hardware: Fiber Channel, media types, link lengths    802.3x full/half duplex links, flow control    802.1p, 802.1Q Virtual LANs (VLANs), Tagging    Wire speed switching and hardware IP routing    Product examples, Extreme Networks    Packet filtering    Trunking or link aggregation    Quality of service, management issues

Faster File Servers    UNIX and Veritas File Systems, logging    File server platforms, disks, I/O requirements    RAID: levels, performance issues, hardware vs. software, system management    Volume Managers, Sun Solstice DiskSuite and Veritas    Fault tolerance: fail-over, backups, storage replication, HSM