We are considering moving our F740 and F760 toasters from quad 100-Mbit ethernet EtherChannel'ed on a Cisco 5500 switch to the gigabit NICs on a new Cisco switch, a 6509.
...and of course, the load distriubtion on the Catalysts is sub-optimal for hosts with large, conecentrated amounts of inbound traffic. (I understand their rationale, but _why_ when Sun Trunking, OnTAP, etc, make this configurable can Cisco not do so too)
Anybody have any experience with the 6509 and NetApp's gigabit cards? Just want to assuage our concerns before placing the PO's.
I've got two 760's on gig uplinks to a 4006 right now (with the primary client being a 4500 also with a gig interface on that switch), which is working quite nicely. In the past, I had a 640 and two 760's also on gig uplinks (Alteon in the 640, Intel's in the 760's). A problem which was never resolved before I left, was exceptionally poor performance on large UDP transfers -- we were never able to pin down a culprit between Cisco, Sun, and Netapp, but lowering nfs.udp.xfersize down to 8k put the numbers back where they belong (albeit with slightly higher cpu load). I don't remember the details now, but if I recall there weren't excessive amounts of reassembly errors..
..kg..