Thanks for all the replies.
Some background info: Sun client is a 420R running Solaris7, NetApp is F820 running 6.1.1R2. Both are PCI cards. I've checked the NOW sites and tried to change various Sun parameters with no significant differences.
Local disk creation takes 35 secs(single drive) vs. NetApp's 7 data/1 parity volume, which produces ~30secs results. Direct tmpfs writes takes 8 secs. Aggregated results in 27.5 seconds, still not much better though.
The NetApp support engineer I worked with mentioned it's back-to-back CP bottleneck, that's not on the network side, correct? Does that mean the Netapp F820 can't handle consistent huge data flows? As to Jumbo frame, I haven't tried it yet, the Gbit switch I use probably won't support it, well. Does it adds a lot to the performance?
May