VLANs and NICs and Switches, Oh My

I've been learning more than I ever wanted to know about the construction of VLANs for special purposes lately, i.e. maximize the performance of an application by working on one particular network bottleneck. By adding an additional nic card to the offending machines, putting those on their own VLAN, and routing particular applications through that rather than the usual load balanced route, we were able to profoundly improve on some network congestion issues. It's just fascinating to watch the network traffic on the various VLANs at the switch between the various machines and see exactly how these little tweaks can really make a difference.

Definitely this is way out of my area of expertise, so I sometimes wonder why I'm being included in all of these discussions, but it's pretty fortunate that I am because it's been a great learning experience. I imagine that if all programmers had more visibility into the nuts and bolts of the network architecture they had to work with, they'd generally produce more secure, robust, better performing code. Most of the time, though, I think that's just not practical from a business operations point of view.

If someone had asked me, "hey, do you want to come to this meeting and discuss this blah, blah, blah network architecture stuff with us?", I probably would have rolled my eyes and said "yeah, right." I'm sure glad no one ever asked.