We are considering moving our F740 and F760 toasters from quad 100-Mbit ethernet EtherChannel'ed on a Cisco 5500 switch to the gigabit NICs on a new Cisco switch, a 6509. We're doing this 'cause:
1. We need more ports. Period. 2. The 6509 has a higher density of ports and gig ports. 3. The gigabit NICs are supposedly much faster, and you can offload the checksum processing from the main CPU to the gigabit card. (We're not even close to saturating the quad link now; I'm just talking latencies. Plus, we beat the crap out of our toasters; if the CPU can do less overhead and more data serving, I want it.)
Anybody have any experience with the 6509 and NetApp's gigabit cards? Just want to assuage our concerns before placing the PO's.
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 ---
...and of course, the load distriubtion on the Catalysts is sub-optimal for hosts with large, conecentrated amounts of inbound traffic. (I understand their rationale, but _why_ when Sun Trunking, OnTAP, etc, make this configurable can Cisco not do so too)
Anybody have any experience with the 6509 and NetApp's gigabit cards? Just want to assuage our concerns before placing the PO's.
I've got two 760's on gig uplinks to a 4006 right now (with the primary client being a 4500 also with a gig interface on that switch), which is working quite nicely. In the past, I had a 640 and two 760's also on gig uplinks (Alteon in the 640, Intel's in the 760's). A problem which was never resolved before I left, was exceptionally poor performance on large UDP transfers -- we were never able to pin down a culprit between Cisco, Sun, and Netapp, but lowering nfs.udp.xfersize down to 8k put the numbers back where they belong (albeit with slightly higher cpu load). I don't remember the details now, but if I recall there weren't excessive amounts of reassembly errors..
..kg..
We're running to F760s with gig ethernet into a Foundry TurboIron switch. In a write intensive environment, the gig cards have not proven to be useful. When doing streaming writes (Oracle hot backup to disk, ndmpcopy from one head to another, database load, etc) we peg the CPU of the F760 at 100% while only getting around 200mbs throughput. We could accomplish the same performance with quadethernet. Hopefully the 800series netapp will improve this write performance bottleneck. However, in a mixed read/write environment, the gig network connection might prove more useful (we haven't done any testing with streaming reads). If you're hoping to switch over to gig to decrease CPU load *and* if your usage is write intensive, don't expect a huge improvement.
Just my $.02.
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Alan Fleming -
kevin graham -
Todd C. Merrill