So this is a good call all around. I finally figured out (once again, thanks to another helpful post on this board) about how to benchmark with DD. Doing the direct reads and writes to a non-deduped, non-compressed filesystem over NFS, I get about 110 MB/sec reading, and writing, which is very close to the limit (like 900 mbit/sec). Meanwhile, if I do the same locally on the EON server, I read at about 290 MB/sec, and read at around 350 MB/sec. So clearly the network is the bandwidth bottleneck.
Ned, can you elaborate a little bit on the problems with link aggregation? I was thinking of adding a dual-port Intel NIC to each system, so that the workstations would have 3, and the server 4, 1000Base-T ports. I was looking into switches, and saw that the HP 1810G was listed as good for this purpose. And does Jumbo Frames actually help anything? As to what I'm doing: I've basically gotten rid of all local data storage on my workstations, and just am using a disk (usually an SSD) for the operating system (Windows XP and 7, Linux, OpenSolaris). I'm working with large scientific data sets, and wanted to see if the fileserver would be fast enough so that I could just work directly over my local network. Makes the problem of synchronizing and storing / backup data so much easier. So I'm happy to add NICs to the workstations if it gives substantially better performance. Thanks! -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
