We have several engineers working from home using Solaris boxes and utilizing VPN's to the office. Typical application use is Cadence. What i have noticed is the NFS performance on the Filers are almost 50% slower than the performance of the Solaris machines. I have run several tests including cp, ftp and utilizing ping roundtrip times, traceroute, snoop and tcpdump to monitor activities between home SUN systems and file systems at work. I have also tested NFS using different transport protocols(tcp/udp) modifying rsize/wsize buffers and using NFS2 and NFS3 versions of NFS. The filers and the Solaris systems at cooperate are on the same subnet - there is no differences in the routing. FYI - the VPN's at home are all Linksys VPN cable/dsl routers configured for Site to Site VPN connections to corporate office.

The problem is definitely with NFS and it is isolated to the Filers. I am confused why the performance of the NetApp NFS would be so poor compared with NFS on the Solaris systems. Now, I know NFS on a WAN is slow and VPN encryption is going to degrade the performance severely, but I am wondering why NetApp NFS performance is much worse than Solaris NFS performance. Basically, when accessing files on a Solaris system(local disk) at the corporate office from home i'm getting about 915KBits/sec. When accessing the same files on a NetApp(F740) at the corporate office from home i'm getting about 510KBits/sec. The transfer mechanism is NFS. When using FTP i get the same 915KBits/sec on the Solaris(local disk) and Filer. The load on the Filer at the time of testing is minimal.

Anyone have any insight on this subject? Any feedback would be appreciated since I put quite a bit of time in this to try and understand the problem here.

Thanks,

Mike McBride Silicon Wave, Inc. (858) 404-5210 mcbride@siliconwave.com http://www.siliconwave.com