[snip]
And, as Bruce indicated, I often run into the cp-to-cp consistency points, so I would be affected by this 10% degradation if I had a fractured RAID group. I probably incorrectly assumed the person asking the question was concerned about performance at the top-end, also, where this 10% may have been helpful. Mea culpa.
Not concerned, yet anyway. I only wish we were pushing on things that hard. "An unused cycle is a wasted cycle!" Ha ha, no, it's nice to have headroom. :-)
I was mostly curious. Traditional wisdom with RAID is that spreading thing out over lots of disks on lots of controllers is better for performance, but since the filers are horses of a different color, that traditional wisdom might not apply.
So, as it stands, I currently have each volume/RAID group on a separate FC-AL adapter, and all is right with the world. Now, if/when it comes time to upgrade, then we'll have to see if re-balancing things makes sense based on what the new hardware looks like. But thanks for all the input, guys.
-- Chris
P.S. Y'know, it dawned on me that Sun has a Gigabit Ethernet+FC-AL combo PCI card. They use OpenBoot PROMs. Filers use OpenBoot. Hmmm. OEM possibility? (Of course, you have to put that pup in a 66Mhz/64-bit slot; is that a problem on the 700 series? I suppose I should glance at the specs...)
-- Chris Lamb, Unix Guy MeasureCast, Inc. 503-241-1469 x247 skeezics@measurecast.com