NetBench is a protocol agnostic benchmark. You can connect via CIFS, NFS, NCP, etc. Having said that, I don't think NetBench is that great of a benchmarking utility.
Response times are at least as important as bandwidth. http://www.netapp.com/ftp/usenix-nt97.pdf has some good info on how latency can looked at when using NetBench (I haven't looked at recent versions of NetBench, which seem to have some response time stuff added in. Maybe it does all of that now). I'm hoping to do some benchmarking soon. The University I work for is currently evaluating NetWare (what we currently use), Windows 2000 and Samba for our future file/print solution. We've got 3 Dell 2550 servers, and a Dell|EMC Clariion 4500 which I'm hoping I'll be allowed to use for some benchmarking. I might be able to use up to about 200 lab workstations. My plan is to compare NetWare 6.0, Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Samba, with all running on identical servers & connected to SAN hardware. There would be 3 NetWare benchmarks - NCP to NSS filesystem, CIFS to traditional filesystem & CIFS to NSS filesystem Windows 2000 Advanced server would just be CIFS to NTFS (FAT doesn't have ACLs) Samba would run on Linux, and would compare all journaling filesystems that support ACLs. That's the plan, at least. I'm hoping to get it approved. I'm really curious to see NetWare vs. Samba numbers. From NetBench results I've found on the net, it seems like they both have close to twice the peak bandwith of Windows 2000, but I haven't seen any results of CIFS access to NetWare. One thing I would like to test for, but I'm not quite sure how to go about it, is how many concurrent connections can each solution support? NetBench doesn't really tell you that. It tells you how the server performs with a given number of active users. Most users are idle most of the time. If we swtich from our current NetWare environment to Linux/Samba, it would be nice to know if we need more servers, the same # of servers, or less servers. I think I know the answer to that if we go with Windows... Well, I don't actually - that's why I'd like to be able to test it.
