AFP - 1 computer, 2 IPs, force connect

Hi, I searched for this and couldn't find anything.

I'm building an intranet server and would like to use both built-in ethernet ports to maximize the bandwidth. I'll assign a different internal static IP to each port, 172.etc -- I'm sharing 2 volumes (made up of RAID drives) on the server. I want 5 client computers to connect to the 1 volume through 1 ethernet port and the other 5 client computers to connect to the other volume through the other port, so it's separated and the traffic of one doesn't affect the other.

I know, on the client end, I can go to Go > Connect to Server > AFP://IP port#1 -- but is there a way to configure it on the server side to make volume1 link to ethernet port1? So a client could connect browsing the Network page in the Finder and it would direct it through the right port. Is that possible?

A different question, is the AFP protocol the same for 10.8 regular OS and 10.8 server OS? If I only have 10 connections is there any speed benefit to having the server software (aside from the monitoring and tools it comes with) but functionality and speed-wise, any difference?

Thanks for any info!

First off the idea of clustering is not to be carried out this way.

If you want to create a larger throughput just bond the two NICs, however you'll need a switch that supports LACP in order to create the switch trunk required for the bonded NICs. This would give you a 2GBs connection to the "intranet" versus two 1GBs connections.

Clustering would be having two (or more) servers with redundant data with one host name. The cluster software then performs what you describe your intention as. But instead of accessing the shared data by this IP or that IP you would access the data at data.domain.lan and the clustering service would hand off the request to the server with the most available resources.

I would say bonding your NICs and using a switch that supports trunking would be your best benefit.

Thanks. I'll look into LACP switches.