Greetings,
Although I've been working in IT and with networking for 10 years, I'm still fairly new to the world of switching and routing. Our network has grown to the point that it's about a mid size network with 200+ computers, devices, APs, switches, and so on. We use EX2200s on most of our access layer switches and a Cisco SG300 for our core switch. What we're running into is a situation where we are trying to run a backup on a group of computers and we think it's a network topology or some other related issue. e.g. I have tested the backup times by connecting a computer directly to the backup server with no switches in between and the backup takes 2 hours. If we run the backup from another computer across the network over copper and fiber and 4 intermediate switches (some fairly cheap ones as well as an EX2200), with approximately similar hardware it takes almost 5 hours.
I'm not asking anyone to figure this out for us, but I just don't know where to start, and I'm not even sure of the right questions to ask. Is this a VLAN issue? Is it STP related? Is it a topology thing? We don't have any redundant connections that we know of that would cause loops. Is there some way to trace the route of packets across the network so we can see how a packet is routing? Also, our EX2200s are configured with some basic VLANs, and that's about it. Our network is fairly plain vanilla and VLAN traffic goes over our router and that's it.
Thanks for any insights,
AV