Guest Blogs

Friday, July 17, 2015

How to Achieve 20Gb and 30Gb Bandwidth through Network Bonding

We’re adding another new voice to the blog – Rob MacQueen is an engineer in our R&D department. In his first blog post, he shares his experiments with setting up network bonding in order to achieve 30Gb bandwidth. Welcome Rob!



The cost of 10GbE networking has dropped dramatically in the last two years. Plus, getting 10GbE to work has simplified as hardware and drivers have matured. This is to the point that anyone who has set up a 1GbE network can set up a 10GbE network. 

And if you are used to 1GbE, you'll love the extra bandwidth in 10GbE. I figure it's sort of like buying one of those new Mustangs ... with the 5.0 liter engine, not that I own one :).

But, if you're like me, faster is never fast enough. The good news for us speed junkies is that it is easy to get lots more from your new 10GbE network. All you have to do is install more than one port, and bind them together.

I've been doing this at 45 Drives in order to test our Storinator storage pods (since they can easily read and write at beyond 2 gigabytes per second, thus easily saturating a single or even double 10GbE connections). My post today will share my work in network bonding, and I'll show how I create 20GbE and 30GbE connections.