Typically, you shouldn’t see any performance decrease – rather, you should get better performance.

Are you seeing some sort of decrease?

What I can point out:  with some things (Excel\Word to be specific), MS will implement stuff that’s not really documented for the file open\discovery which can cause problems, but I doubt that’s what you are running into given the speed you are speaking of.  Likewise, using Windows NLB (LB not HA) doesn’t always go very well given the fact that it’s not the best technology and sometimes can display interop problems with other vendors (not just NetApp).

What exactly are you doing for your test?

Glenn

---

From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Langdon, Laughlin T. (Lock)
Sent: Tuesday, March 27, 2007 2:33 PM
To: toasters@mathworks.com
Subject: CIFS overhead with Netapp Filers

I was wondering what the CIFS overhead for a NetApp filer would be. 

Let’s say for instance a Windows Server to Windows Server transfer on the same switch, same subnet, GIG copper interconnects, no TOE card, etc gets me up to about 50% utilization (500Mbps). 

Should that same server to a Netapp Filer see a 20-30% degradation in TX/RX speeds because of CIFS overhead?

What should I expect for data rates in this type of scenario?  Are there any tweaks anyone knows of to decrease this gap?

(same results using static link aggregation, and LACP for the VIF)

Thanks

Lock