TheTechGuide Forum
General Category => Hardware => Topic started by: Anonymous on February 15, 2003, 10:49:56 AM
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What are the benifits of putting dual ethernet cards into a computer or server
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the reasone one would do such is to isolate 2 networks. Lets say you have a fire wall. ON this fire wall you have 2 NIC\'s one for local traffic and one for WAN traffic ...now most people are familiar with such idea now that \"brodband\" routers are all the fad now a days. One port you plug into your DSL/CABLE one your LAN. Why? because you dont want to mix the two. You are spicifically wanting traffice on one to staw away from the other. But you want a bridge between the two so that ONLY the traffice you want will cross.
There is another reason, you might want traffic balance across the network cards, if you were a small company and for some reason using a load balancer you might load balance each NIC (this senerio is just for my explination) Why? if you had a server putting out images or movies. And you had 100MB on each card. Lets say that yor bottle neck was the 100MB but you had lots of people requesting the data. You would banance the requests into each NIC so you would have 2x as meny coustomers able to get what they want.
OR you might just want to have two networks. ONe is a Lan the other is a LAn part two ...sometimes used in a Production/Development enviroment. You could do this if you didnt want to unplug/plug a cable each time you want to switch networks.
I have only covered the common practices that i have used in my life... needless to say that there are 100\'s of reasons people could create or solutions to problems that you could find with 2 NIC;s hope this helps