[olug] 10 gig pci express network card?

[Carl Lundstedt]

> 10G ethernet to servers is pretty cutting-edge, with very few interface
> cards on the market; most of it is hard to find. Most 10G stuff I see is
> switch<->switch.
>
>
>   
I believe the reason this is pretty cutting edge is because you'll be 
hard pressed to saturate a 10Gbps link with a single server.  The best 
performers we've seen from our storage servers was at about 320 MB/sec 
writes (3 or so Gbps) and (IIRC) 500 MB/sec reads.  These are our 24 
disk SCSI enclosed SATA drives.  The best we've seen from our NFS server 
(which was the best performance the vendor's engineers had seen) was 120 
MB/sec.  This was a Fiber channel enclosure to 12 SATA disks over an 
'NFS on a stick' card.

The only way we can fill our 10 Gb link is by channel bonding multiple 
gridftp servers behind the switch.

My advice would be to make sure you need/can use 10 Gb interconnects 
before paying the premium for them.  Perhaps you could get by with just 
channel bonding 2 or 3 1 Gbps links.  (All our servers have 2x1 Gbps 
ports on board and we could add another card if needed.)

Carl Lundstedt
UNL