I run some CIFS sessions, probably not enough to judge performance vs. a server / LUN config but there's two reasons why I limit my CIFS services
- Group Policies and security. NetApp CIFS doesn't support GPO's and
Kerberos security.
ONTAP does support Kerberos security. And I expect that it's possible to serve the filesystem component of a GPO from a filer (I've never tried, but if it works with Samba it likely works with ONTAP).
-- Luke
--