10GbE speeds

[gnn at freebsd.org]

At Sat, 12 Apr 2008 09:08:13 +1000,
Aristedes Maniatis wrote:
> 
> I have a project with 3 workstations all needing high speed access to  
> about 6Tb of storage. In the past I've installed technology such as  
> fibre channel connected SAN storage (using Apple's xsan) for up to a  
> dozen workstations, but with only three workstations for this project  
> I'm thinking about 10GbE. The workstations will be OSX and the server  
> FreeBSD 7 with a bunch of disks in a RAID 5 or RAID 10 configuration.
> 
> Are 10GbE NICs and drivers significantly mature enough under FreeBSD  
> to accomplish this? I'd need to achieve about 60MB/s transfer rate  
> which is theoretically quite doable, as long as the drive array can  
> keep up with three streams of that speed. I'd use netatalk, samba or  
> nfs to share files depending on which I can eek the best speeds out of.
> 
> Alternatively I could populate the server with 1GbE NICs, one per  
> workstation and use cross over cable. That way there is absolutely no  
> contention on the network.
> 
> Any thoughts about the viability of this? Is 10GbE in production use  
> with FreeBSD and does it scale well?

I am working with the Chelsio hardware and it seems to be well
supported on FreeBSD.  All the machines in that system are FreeBSD
though.  How do you intend to get the OSX systems to be 10GE?

Best,
George