Having met at VMworld 2010, Daniel Bowers and I were having an ongoing discussion around server architectures and how they impact network performance. I convinced him to come onto the show and talk broadly about what goes on inside a server. Mostly we focus on how server performance impacts network performance. I wouldn’t call this a deep dive, more of an overview into some of the ideas to keep in the top of your head.

This show was recorded on 4th October 2011. It’s taken a while to find a slot where we can publish this show – we’ve got too much to talk about.

PCI Express bus connections can support 10GbE.
PCI Express is a point to point connection
Memory performance affects network performance.
You may get better performance with less memory modules according the type of memory bus in use.
Physical slots in the chassis have different properties.
Servers don’t make good switches

Guests

Daniel Bowers is an server design engineer and marketeer who analyzes server architectures and performance for the IT research firm Ideas International. He’s also a primary representative at SPEC and TPC. Follow him on Twitter, or read his blogs on ideasint.blogs.com.