We've encountered issues like that in our environment. Obviously, we bought the FILER for its redundancy as well as speed in serving data. I had opened several cases on the NOW site about the apparent slowness. Our FILER was setup with a 100-base-t connection directly to our 3Com CoreBuilder 9000, which has a Gigabit backbone.
We found that it would take 75 seconds to open a 250 KB Excel Spreadsheet and 110 seconds to save it to the FILER. Sometimes, it wouldn't save and would give "delayed-write" errors. However, our NT 4 Server that the FILER was replacing also had similar delays BUT these spreadsheets would eventually save OK.
NetApp had us do a lot of pktt'ing and other configuration testing. For our specific environment, it turned out the culprit was the fact that users were connecting to a 3Com 10-base-t hub that was connected to a 3Com SuperStack Switch. We also found hubs interconnected to each other and then connected to the switch. According to their analysis of the pktt traces, it appeared that the FILER was handling data fine, but there were some sort of network bottlenecks on our side.
Kudos for NetApp TSE's willingness to help us trouble-shoot some of our non-FILER-related network investigation.
Reconfiguring users to connect to the switch at 100/Full-Duplex fixed access speed issues. (The users also felt that somehow, we had sped up all of their computers.)
We found it a bit odd that the FILER seemed to desire high-speed network connections vs. being able to handle pokey slow network connections. Of course, this may specifically be due to our network setup and all of the 20 year-old CAT-3 wiring everywhere, plus mice chewing up cables.
We recently purchased the McAfee NetShield 4.5 for NetApp but have yet to implement it. As the FILER's virus scan feature is somewhat immature, I do not look forward to setting this us.
Geert Jackers gj@pandora.be Wednesday, January 30, 2002 10:32:39 AM >>>
Hi,
we have F740 and F820 running only CIFS. We hear everywhere that the performance is great of these boxes. We installed the latest 6.1.1R2 (I think) which would solve some problems with virusscanning (trendmicro) on the boxes and clients. When we read a file (doc file) it is somewhat fast, but when we save it it takes twice as long as on a NT box. When we do the same with a RTF file....or TXT it is much faster. Not to say when opening or working with outlook and .pst files on that share, it takes forever.....almost. We see that when we open a file on the box a ~file is created on the same directory too, can this have an influence ? A copy from a file to and from the box....also slow.
We have a 100 Mbit switched network and 1 Gbit links to the filers....other traffic on the network is fast etc. We disabled viruschecking on the filer and the pc's...no difference.
Do we need to tune or set special parameters on the filer ? Somebody has had the same experience....?
Please any info is appreciated.
Geert
Geert Jackers Siemens Business Services Belgium