I believe this is a limitation of all the current trunking technologies (at least, the one that Sun, Cisco, NetApp, and 3Com use for 100bT in any case).
IMHO, if the filer is to be primarily used as a backend for one large ORACLE box, and you need bandwidth between them, put gigabit NICs in at each end. You could even just cross-over the fibre cable for a point-point connection if you didn't need gigabit between anything else at the start (and use the 100bT onboard to talk to the other clients).
Exactly. Many EtherChannel and EtherChannel-style trunking algorithms use MAC addresses to distribute the data down the pipes of a trunk. Therefore, if you only have 1 client, these implementations will only use one pipe. NetApp simply reflects the response down the same pipe the request came in on. So if you only have 1 client, Gbit is the way to go...nice big pipe. You get no throughput advantadge from a multi-trunk due to these switch algorithms.
Hope this helps.
-- Adam Fox, CCNA, CNX - Ethernet NetApp Professional Services, NC adamfox@netapp.com