Hello,
this is my first posting to this list.
A customer of us has a NetApp 3020 with 3 S-ATA shelfes each filled with 500 GB disks. He has a trunked 2*1 GBit network connection.
So with the Etherchannel or 802.3ad, he has a maximum throughput potential of about 200MB/s. (2Gbps). Do I understand this correctly?
Which load sharing method is the customer using on the port channel?
He has 3 volumes, each volume resides on a different aggregate built from the disks of one shelf each.
Via NFS he gets a perfomrance of sustained 60 MB per second with large and small files. Only one connection used during the test, no aditional traffic on the system and network segment. He expected the performance to be "much" better.
What is he doing to test? Copy files (Local disk might be bottleneck) dd? iozone? 60MB sustained is pretty good for a single GbE connection, and my initial guess is that his server is doing the best it can, but probably won't go any faster with a single NIC.
If he really wanted to tax the filer, have him use two load generators instead of one. If the etherchannel / link aggregation is setup in the typical fashion, he won't see higher throughput unless he uses two client machines.
Regards, Max