HP3000/HP 3000 FAQ

Last Updated: Thursday, February 01, 2007 02:38 PM

Picking wire (media) for HP3000 Networks

4.1.1. Picking wire (media)

KP

My recommendation, or 2 cents worth, is that new installations, or installations with resources, put in a fiber backbone with 10BaseT home cabling. The reason for this is that you get 100Mbs through the backbone and, if you want to 100Mbs to the desktop(100BaseVG). Also, UTP provides the advantage of star topology, isolating most problems to the node level.

BR

One caveat to the above: on the 10-base T cabling, when installing any new cable, put in category 5 wiring AND make sure your connectors are category 5 compliant as well. you need BOTH to eventually pull 100MBs around the network, and category 5 is not that much more expensive than category 3 and is certainly a lot less than re-pulling new wire when you need the added bandwidth.

CM

One key point for either 10BaseT or Thick is the amount of bandwidth there is and how much you can actually use. One number I hear fairly consistently is 30% busy on Ethernet. Much above that and performance goes quickly to the trash heap.

So, figure it out. 10Mbits/Sec = 1.25 Mbytes/Sec. 1.25Mbytes/Sec @ 30% = 0.375 Mbytes/Sec available throughput.

If you're going to put a 50 gig server on, you better have multiple network paths into it, have it on an FDDI channel, or have fairly low access.