Also, Sun sells a QFE (Quad Fast Ethernet) card that supports the "trunking" of all four ports of this card which allows an 800Mb/s (100x4xfull duplex) connection toother compatible devices (other Suns, I assume some ethernet switches, etc.)
That's called EtherChannel.
Does anyone know if the quad ethernet controllers in the 630 can be configured this way?
They cannot, nor can single-port interfaces. If you need a bigger pipe, Gigabit Ethernet is really the right way to go. NetApp has has had working Gb Ether for over a year now, and now that Alteon is shipping production boards in quantity, we're shipping it. Sun is also using Alteon (switches and SBus cards), under their own name, so interoperability isn't a problem.
Also, has anyone benchmarked how much data a NetApp 630 can push to half a dozen to a dozen Ultra 2's that are directly connected via 100mb/s full duplex connections? Any tuning hints? I'd definitely appreciate learning from the collective experience.
One thing to try is half-duplex. I know it sounds weird, but in some cases it seems to perform better than full-duplex. It may not be the case in your situation, but don't assume anything.
Beyond that, SPEC SFS shows that an F630 with FDDI is hitting the wall at around 4500 ops/sec. Very roughly, for the SPEC SFS 1.1 load mix, 300 ops/sec equals 1 MB/sec. Therefore, the F630 is topping out at about 15 MB/sec or 150 Mb/sec. Your use of "push" suggests you may have a very read-intensive environment, however, which could mean that you'd see significantly more throughput at a reasonable response time. The SFS numbers should at least give you an idea of what's in the ballpark.
-- Karl Swartz - Technical Marketing Engineer Network Appliance kls@netapp.com (W) kls@chicago.com (H)