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Teaming NICs

If you picture beefy servers as muscle cars, then a Gigabit Ethernet link is like a long stretch of open highway, while Fast Ethernet is, well, a two-lane road with lots of dump trucks. (Ten Gigabit Ethernet? The autobahn.)

For those stuck with 100-Mbps connections, TNICs (teaming NICs) will deliver better performance for less money. Likewise, isn't it about time you got some fault-tolerant links? Even without taking advantage of load-balancing, these products will make your servers that much more reliable. After all, network cables have been accidentally unplugged by janitors, interns -- even clumsy network admins.

All the TNICs we tested showed similar performance numbers, so the extra features drove our results. IP Metrics' NIC Express offers the best fault tolerance. 3Com's and Intel's cards don't offer as much fault tolerance, but they run very fast and on more operating systems. Adaptec's strength -- and weakness -- is in its card's single-slot design. All the TNICs are able to perform switch-independent outgoing traffic load-balancing. NIC Express and 3Com offer completely switch-independent incoming load-balancing. Intel's and Adaptec's cards require load-balancing-capable switches to balance incoming traffic. If you have a Cisco Systems switch, any solution is fair game for incoming balancing.

In the end, our Editor's Choice award went to IP Metrics by a nose, because its NIC Express accommodates all the network cards we tested, albeit on Microsoft Windows NT and 2000 servers only. If you need to maximize slot space, Adaptec's quad-port card offers only fair performance but uses just one PCI slot, while Intel is the only vendor to support load-balancing under Linux. Finally, 3Com's dual-port adapter uses just two slots with above-average performance. Bottom line: If increasing throughput while gaining fault tolerance and load-balancing capabilities -- and spending less than $500 -- sounds good to you, take a TNIC for a test-drive today.