Hello,

We've been running a pair of clustered F760's since about February. Among other things, we are using them for Oracle database storage, with the hosts being Suns running Solaris 7 or 8. The interconnect is via gigabit Ethernet through a Cisco 3508 switch. We're doing NFS service only -- no CIFS. The volumes in question are between 60 and 80% full, and consist of between ten and 14 drives, either 18G or 36G depending on the volume. OS version is 6.1R1. NFS mounts are using UDP, version 3, rsize=32768, wsize=32768 (though Netapp has suggested reducing this to 8k).

Recently, we have been running up against the limit of the F760's write performance, or so it seems. At best, a single (GigE connected) host is able to do 7-8MB/s of sustained sequential write traffic. These same hosts are able to read at greater than 30 MB/sec and sometimes as high as 50 MB/sec if the data is all in cache on the Netapp.

What I'd really like to know is what kind of sustained write rates other folks are seeing in configurations similar to this one. At the very least, if you have any kind of F760 cluster, even without gigabit Ethernet, are you able to do more than 7-8MB sustained write?

Also, when the writes are occurring, the filer CPU load is generally very high, anywhere from 80 to 100%. Disk utilitization is more reasonable, around 50% if the filer is not otherwise busy.

My first thought (and Netapp's as well) would be that this is some kind of network problem, perhaps relating to GigE flow control. However, if this were the case I would expect the Filer CPU load to be lower.

If anyone has seen (or fixed!) anything like this, I would appreciate any suggestions or advice.

Thanks in advance, Allen Belletti System Administrator Digital Motorworks Phone: 512-692-1024 Fax: 512-349-9366 abelletti@digitalmotorworks.com www.digitalmotorworks.com

-----Original Message----- From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com]On Behalf Of Andrew Smith Sent: Monday, April 23, 2001 12:58 PM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: dump to remote device via rmt

Hello,

I've been dumping my filer to a remote HP DDS-4 drive on a RedHat Linux machine. It's been working great. But now I have more data on my filer than one DDS-4 tape will hold for a level-0 dump.

Are there any issues with spanning more than one tape for a dump via rmt? Here is the output of my dump run:

DUMP: Dumping tape file 1 on /dev/nst0 DUMP: creating "/vol/vol0/../snapshot_for_backup.3" snapshot. DUMP: Using Full Volume Dump DUMP: Date of this level 0 dump: Mon Apr 23 10:40:26 2001. DUMP: Date of last level 0 dump: the epoch. DUMP: Dumping /vol/vol0/ to dumper DUMP: mapping (Pass I)[regular files] DUMP: mapping (Pass II)[directories] DUMP: estimated 24452615 KB. DUMP: dumping (Pass III) [directories] DUMP: dumping (Pass IV) [regular files] DUMP: Mon Apr 23 10:46:54 2001 : We have written 560012 KB.

[... lines removed ...]

DUMP: Mon Apr 23 12:37:04 2001 : We have written 21097444 KB. DUMP: Remote write failed: RMT bad response from client DUMP: DUMP IS ABORTED DUMP: Deleting "/vol/vol0/../snapshot_for_backup.3" snapshot.

Is there a way I can have dump prompt me to change volumes? I haven't been able to find much information on the subject.

Thanks!

-Andrew Smith DCANet