File server

[T1m]

I have a file server running 2000 server on a 100base switch with quite a large database on it and 7 clients accessing the information.
Has anyone got any suggestion on speeding up the access of the information?
Can domains help?

cheers :O)

[jamis]

As long as everyone is using 100Mbps ethernet cards, the only bottleneck I could see is either the raw speed of the file server (CPU/memory) or everyone trying to access the one machine all at once.

If the fileserver isn't a very 'beefy' machine, I'd suggest getting another machine and splitting the database and fileserving duties to different machines... or perhaps a NAS device to act as the file server.

[T1m]

cheers mate
whats a nas and the machine is a ibm netfinity p3 800 with 256mb ram and 3 v quick scsi disks

[T1m]

Can i speed up the speed of data I/O by installing two network cards one for upstream data and one for downstream data?

[jamis]

NAS = Network Attached Storage ... its basically a bunch of disks with an ethernet card that you simply plug into your network and you mount volumes of the NAS box to as physical storage for any machines that wish to use it.

There is some software that allows to to essentially 'bond' multiple ehtnernet cards, but i can't remember what it's called or who wrote it. As for using 2 ethernet cards, it would only help if your users themselves picked the card that was being used less unless you had some strange routing scheme worked out http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif Basically, by adding another ethernet card, you'd give the machine a second IP/name for use with that card.

[Dovaka]

it may have been from me with my cable modems the program that i used from from ipmetrics.com and was called Nic Express