NAS 1200s 1T NIC Lan Team

[Thomas Wong]

Has anyone found a way to bind the two gigabit network interfaces? I've been searching for a solution to utilize both interfaces for increased performance in data throughput.

[Jon Paul]

Hi Thomas,

Just a question at this time.
Is your network really the bottleneck for your performance?
A single Gb NIC should be capable of ~100MB/sec.
A good way to test this out is to use a benchmarking tool. ex. IOZone (www.iozone.org) Run a sweep of file sizes from a client to the server make sure you use files which will fit into RAM and files which will not fit in RAM. A file size larger than your RAM size should show you the current top speed of your backend storage. Files that fit into RAM should show you current network top speed.

[Boris.N.NY]

You can use the standard HP driver for similar Broadcom 570x onboard NIC's and HP Network Configuration Utility for Windows Server 2003 from ProLiant Support Pack (PSP) for Microsoft Windows Server 2003. I believe current PSP version is 7.40B. It is downloadable (about 77 MB) for any recent server platform from HP support site.

When you open downloaded archive check the TXT readme file for accuracy of my info, but your NAS 1200s onboard Broadcom NetXtreme chipset would be equal to Broadcom 5704 server integrated NIC aka NC7782. So the driver would be "cp005567.exe" - HP NC10xx/67xx/77xx/150x/320x/325x Gigabit Ethernet NIC Driver v.8.39 for Windows Server 2003. And then you would be able to use the HP standard "cp005319.exe" - HP Network Configuration Utility v.8.10 for Windows Server 2003.

This trick worked well on my 1200s.

[Boris.N.NY]

On an extra note the latest-and-greatest SR 5.6 for 1200s has only v.6.64 of the Broadcom driver (b57xp32.sys) for 5704. Broadcom lists a v.8.48 available on the web site. I have just recently restored a 1200s and for lab purposes used the drivers on the secondary OS partition (it also happened to be pre-SR 5.6 regardless of the primary OS build) - both v.6.64 and 8.48 are recognizable and usable by HP NIC teaming utility in my test before and after applying SR 5.6 to it.

The only downgrade I've seen was when I added a different (non-Broadcom) NIC to it and tried to team up all 3 - some functions got degraded. The utility gave a warning promt about that.