Since I've seen a little bit of talk about 10GbE on here in the past I figured I'd share some of my experiences...

I've recently been testing some of Sun's dual-port 10GbE NICs on some small T2000's (1Ghz, 4-core).  I'm only using a single port on each card, and the servers are currently directly connected to each other (waiting for my network team to get switches and fibre in place).

So far, I've been able to drive throughput between these two systems to about 7500Mbit/sec using iperf.  When the throughput gets this high, all the cores/threads on the receiving T2000 become saturated and TCP retransmits start climbing, but both systems remain quite responsive.  Since these are only 4-core T2000's, I would guess that the 6 or 8-core T2000's (especially with 1.2Ghz or 1.4Ghz processors) should be capable of more throughput, possibly near line speed.

The down side achieving this high of throughput is that it requires lots of data streams.  When transmitting with a single data stream, the most throughput I've gotten is about 1500Mbit/sec.  I only got up to 7500Mbit/s when using 64 data streams…  Also, the biggest gains seem to be in the jump from 1 to 8 data streams;  with 8 streams I was able to get throughput up to 6500Mbit/sec.

Our goal for 10GbE, is to be able to restore data from tape at a speed of at least 2400Mbit/sec (300MB/sec).  We have large daily backups (3-4TB) that we would like to be able to restore (not backup) in a reasonable amount of time.  These restores are used to refresh our test and development environments with current data.  The actual backups are done with array based snapshots (HDS ShadowCopy), which then get mounted and backed up by a dedicated media server (6-core T2000).  We're currently getting about 650MB/sec of throughput with the backups (9 streams on 3 LTO3 tape drives - MPX=3 and it's very compressible data).

Going off my iperf results, the restoring this data using 9 streams should get us well over 2400Mbit/sec.  But - we haven't installed the cards on our media servers yet, so I have yet to see what the actual performanee of netbackup and LTO3 over 10GbE is.  I'm hopeful it'll be close to the iperf results, but if it doesn't meet the goal then we'll be looking at other options.

--
Devon Peters

_______________________________________________
Veritas-bu maillist  -  Veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu