This page describes the hardware currently included in our
NFS client test bed.
This test bed is designed around a gigabit Ethernet switch
and a Network Appliance F85 file server.
It is designed to removed disk and network bottlenecks
as much as possible to explore client behavior in a
high-performance environment.
Gigabit Ethernet Switch
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Our gigabit Ethernet switch is an Extreme Networks
Summit 7i.
Ours has 28 100/1000Base-T Cat5/6 ports, and four
GBIC module slots for short- and long-run fiber connections.
Its wire-speed switching capability can switch up to
64 gigabits per second or 48 million packets per second.
It includes software support for gig-E trunking and QOS,
load-balancing, and jumbo Ethernet frames.
All systems in our test bed except the firewalled
connection to the outside Internet world connect to
this switch via a 64-bit/66Mhz PCI gig-E NIC and
Cat6 cabling.
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Our main NFS file service is provided by a Network Appliance
F85 filer.
This filer can contain up to 684G of unformatted storage in either
a direct-access or RAID configuration, accessible via NFSv2 or v3,
HTTP, or CIFS network file acess protocols.
We also hope to be one of the first sites that use NetApp's
upcoming NFSv4 implementation.
This entry-level product can deliver very fast write performance
via non-volatile RAM.
Write performance is an important area of research for NFS client
performance and scalability.
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Alternate file service comes from a 4-CPU Linux system made
by Intel.
This system is comprised of 512M of RAM, four 550Mhz Xeon
CPUs, and more than 40G of disk storage on high-speed LVD
SCSI drives.
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Linux client hardware was integrated in-house.
These systems are based on the ServerWorks LE III chipset
and 933Mhz Pentium III CPUs.
They contain high-speed memory and a single high-performance
IBM Deskstar IDE drive.
They all use a 64-bit/66Mhz PCI gig-E NIC.
More information
is available about their construction.
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Our reference is Sun's NFS implementation in the Solaris(tm)
operating system.
Today our test harness includes two single-CPU Sun Ultra 1 systems
with 100Mb ethernet and 7200RPM SCSI drives running
Solaris 2.6.
We hope to upgrade these systems to SMP Ultra 60s soon.
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Our plan is to include other systems in our test harness.
We'd like to support testing *BSD and Hummingbird implementations,
as well as new NFS versions from Sun and Network Appliance.
Last modified: Thu May 3 14:11:50 EDT 2001
