thanks. clients are primarily doing office processing kinds of stuff, msword, little databases, etc. we currently run nfs client [sun solstice] and have them file on two sun e5000's. most users have atm to the desktop. i am going to use two f760's in cluster, probably in active|standby mode. we have about 1700 users. we would probably move them data to the filers and slowly change from nfs to cifs.

"Todd C. Merrill" wrote:

On Wed, 6 Sep 2000, neil lehrer wrote:

...

i'd appreciate hearing what you think of the cifs performance on netapp filers. i am considering a f760, our wkstations are primarily nt 4.0 sp5.

    Incredible.  See a similar post of mine:

http://teaparty.mathworks.com:1999/toasters/5921.html

NetApp should offer them like crack: "the first one's free." Once you taste the power, you're hooked. No more Sun NFS servers; no more Windows CIFS servers.

See also NetApp's own pages for NetBench results: http://www.netapp.com/tech_library/3056.html

Google returned this little tidbit, too, written by a dude at NetApp: http://www.chicago.com/~kls/papers/nt97/

Long latencies are a silent killer.

Though an NFS benchmark, SFS97 gives a good measure of the capacity of the file servers out there, with actual graphs with latencies:

http://www.spec.org/osg/sfs97/results/

Provide details of what your workstations are doing, and somebody out here is probably already running something similar, and can give you concrete numbers for that type of environment.

    Until next time...

The Mathworks, Inc. 508-647-7000 x7792 3 Apple Hill Drive, Natick, MA 01760-2098 508-647-7001 FAX tmerrill@mathworks.com http://www.mathworks.com

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