eWeek and eTesting labs are one in the same.
Actually no. eTesting labs are now an independent contract testing and QA laboratory. They used to be owned by Ziff Davis, and were responsible for the lab work behind the assorted product reviewlets that were published in the various ZD periodicals over the years, but ZD sold them off and now they are basically a "lab for hire". They'll do contract QA work, testing, report writing and publishing, whatever. We've subcontracted a little work to them ourselves on the NetCache side. They're good folks. See:
http://www.etestinglabs.com/main/reports/networkapp.pdf
A 100 MB file is not something that most companies use on a daily basis. The 59 KB size is somewhat small, but not that abnormal.
A tertiary scan of my systems would seem to indicate that you and I live in somewhat different worlds! :-)
To put their 212 MB/sec claim into perspective
Their claim is 219.658 MB/sec, at least as far as this test went.
this is 4x the fastest performance I have seen from a NetApp 840.
Have you ever done a memory-to-network test on an F840?
I do find their numbers circumspect in that 212 MB/sec is faster than the theoretical maximum of the pipe they were using.
You're forgetting about the full duplex nature of GbE, which will truck along at 125 MB/sec in each direction, so they're still leaving 38 MB/sec on the table when all the theoretical math is done. Actually, 30.342 MB/sec.
Anyway, we don't normally publish tests like this one that BlueArc commissioned, because we don't have many customers running their filers diskless. However, we do run memory-to-network & network-to-memory tests internally, as those numbers are of interest from the engineering perspective, especially to our engineering units responsible for tuning network stacks, drivers, low level I/O firmware and so forth.
To their credit, BlueArc have done a pretty good job in this area, because as far as the F840 goes, their numbers are only slightly lower than our own. We have the advantage of being able to use multiple GbE interfaces though, so "no fair" really.
Keith