The catch with trunking is that a single host will not see performance gains, unless they are load balancing across 2 nics and the filer is load balancing in the exact same manner. (not likely, but it can occur as aaron notes) Generally, trunking is used for load aggregation to provide higher performance to a larger number of clients. If you are looking for higher throughput that about 100MB/s you should be talking with your Network Appliance SE about assisting in the configuration and design of the system.

David Byte Senior Systems Engineer 918-461-9255 davidb@uptime.net

-----Original Message----- From: aaron hirsch Sent: Wednesday, March 30, 2005 3:53 PM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: RE: Netapp trunking - no performance gain

I'm trying to setup trunking on a netapp connected to a Cisco 3550 gigabit switch (OS vers.12 on the switch).

Sorry no experience with this switch...

The odd thing is that when I setup two gigabit lines trunked together from the netapp to the switch I saw no improvement in thoughtput compared to a single gigabit line.

Again, not familiar with this particular switch...however, I have setup an enviornment similar to what you described and did see performance increase instantly.

Extreme Summit 200-48 with a FAS250. I created a single vif interface out of the 2 gige interfaces on the FAS250 and enabled sharing on the switch ports that they plug into. I then took two 10/100 cards on a server and bound them togther and enabled sharing on the ports for the switch too. I went from pushing about 10MB/sec from the server to 20MB/sec. As this is well below the theoretical maximum for two gige ports trunked together, 250MB/sec (125MB/sec each), the problem is that pushing so little data makes it hard to see how effectively the gige trunk works.

So, to answer your original question, yes I have done it; but utilizing 10/100 cards doesn't do justice when testing performance on a gige device.