10GbE speeds

[Benjeman J. Meekhof]

Hi Aristedes,

We are/were testing FreeBSD on a Dell PE2950 with a Myricom 10GB 
PCI-Express copper CX card.  The driver seems mature.  In tests out of 
the box, I only saw about 3Gbps from iperf (testing against a linux 
system...and maybe there are other issues with our environment/that 
system to tune up yet...i wouldn't take that number too seriously).

I think some tuning could get it up to the maximum, anyways.  It 
certainly took a little work to get our Linux systems up to the max, so 
I would say that in general the defaults with 10G drivers on any system 
need some work to hit the maximum bandwidth.

-Ben

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?
> 
> 
> Cheers
> Ari Maniatis
> 
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Benjeman Meekhof - UM ATLAS/AGLT2 Computing
office: 734-764-3450 cell: 734-417-6312