recommendations for file server based zfs appliance

[Pete French]

> Maybe the folk that made hardware suggestions can post which net
> interface(s) they are using and whether they are seeing driver issues?

The HP boxes have Broadcom ethernet controllers driven with the 'bge'
driver, and thatw orks fine. I stick to Intel or Broadcom controllers for
gigabit ether where I have a choice. The only 10 gig cards we have are
some 2nd hand Mellanox ConnectX-2 cards because they are dirt cheap on
eBay. They work fine in FreeBSD using the mlxen driver (add MK_OFED=yes 
to tour /etc/src.conf) but we have had a lot of problems getting them to talk
to anthing other than other identical cards - a set of Qlogic (I think)
HP cards would work very occasionally, but most of the time would not
find a carrier. We are using twinax copper SFF+ for the 10 gig, maybe
I would have got better luck with optical, but it wasnt importnat enough
to do any serious testing on.

-pete.