The catch with trunking is that a single host will not see performance
gains, unless they are load balancing across 2 nics and the filer is
load balancing in the exact same manner. (not likely, but it can occur
as aaron notes) Generally, trunking is used for load aggregation to
provide higher performance to a larger number of clients. If you are
looking for higher throughput that about 100MB/s you should be talking
with your Network Appliance SE about assisting in the configuration and
design of the system.
David Byte
Senior Systems Engineer
918-461-9255
davidb@uptime.net
-----Original Message-----
From: aaron hirsch
Sent: Wednesday, March 30, 2005 3:53 PM
To: toasters@mathworks.com
Subject: RE: Netapp trunking - no performance gain
> I'm trying to setup trunking on a netapp connected to a Cisco 3550
>gigabit switch (OS vers.12 on the switch).
Sorry no experience with this switch...
> The odd thing is that when I setup two gigabit lines trunked together
>from the netapp to the switch I saw no improvement in thoughtput
>compared to a single gigabit line.
Again, not familiar with this particular switch...however, I have setup
an enviornment similar to what you described and did see performance
increase instantly.
Extreme Summit 200-48 with a FAS250. I created a single vif interface
out of the 2 gige interfaces on the FAS250 and enabled sharing on the
switch ports that they plug into. I then took two 10/100 cards on a
server and bound them togther and enabled sharing on the ports for the
switch too. I went from pushing about 10MB/sec from the server to
20MB/sec. As this is well below the theoretical maximum for two gige
ports trunked together, 250MB/sec (125MB/sec each), the problem is that
pushing so little data makes it hard to see how effectively the gige
trunk works.
So, to answer your original question, yes I have done it; but utilizing
10/100 cards doesn't do justice when testing performance on a gige
device.
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