Re: Interesting observation

["bostonlinuxandunix" <user=37@nabble.blu.org>]

 On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 10:39 AM,  <[hidden email]> wrote: 

>  However, up until now, I believe, disks have always been faster than 
>  network. When ethernet was 10 mbit/s, disks were 2 mbyte/s, with ethernet 

Back in 2000, I worked ata place in Marlboro where the main office in 
California was using a NetApp array and we were mirroring it nightly 
to a heterogeneous collection of local disks on Sun workstations. The 
main office wanted us to get a NetApp ourselves, and the engineers in 
my group were skeptical. 

They were concerned that using an NFS-mounted file system would slow 
them down too much, and I argued that the slowdown would be almost 
unnoticeable, as we had just switched from 10baseT to 100baseTX. 

I convinced the group to do a comparison to measure the difference, and 
while I expected the NetApp to be slightly slower than local disks, it turned 
out that the NetApp was actually about 20% faster than local disk when 
doing a complete recompile of their software on a Sun Ultra 60 workstation 
with its RAM maxed out. 

As I recall, the local hard drive in that machine was an Ultra-160 SCSI drive 
at 10,000 RPMs. The NetApp was able to outperform this with 100mb/s, 
and this 8 years ago. 


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