I am trying to determine the max I/O capacity of a Sun E4500 for usage as a
Legato storage node.  Here are the current stats and 'designed' I/O plans:

Sun E4500, 8x 400Mhz 4-8G Ram
        4 System Boards, 3 I/O boards
4x Gb Ethernet (Trunked as single IP)
3x 2Gb HBA fibre to Tape devices
6x STK 9940B in STK 9310 silo***

Since you lose ethernet bandwidth due to TCP/IP overhead, you can anticipate
~80MB/sec* per NIC (total ~320MB/sec).  The HBA fibre can handle
~250MB/sec** (total ~750MB/sec) and the 9940B drives running compressed at
60MB/sec*** per drive (total ~360MB/sec).  This should mean I will be
passing 320MB/sec over the e4500 I/O boards.  I am still determining if this
needs to be done GigE+HBA per I/O board or an all GigE board, all HBA board,
and a 'rollover' I/O board.
So I guess I am really wondering if anyone is pushing anything close to this
level of bulk data over a single storage node, regardless of the hardware
types being used.  Thank you all in advance for any information you may be
able to provide.
--Ted Reed, Engineering Storage Services


* 10BaseT ~0.8KB/sec, 100BaseT ~8MB/sec, 1000BaseT ~80MB/sec due to ~20-25%
TCP/IP overhead
** Little to no overhead on fibre for protocols.  1Gb=125MB, 2Gb=250MB
*** 30MB/sec native, 60MB/sec compressed, 90MB/sec burst.  200G native
capacity, 300-600G compressed

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