Designing a High Performance Network File Server

3
Benchmark Methodology
Server System
Figure 1 below illustrates the NFS server used during this benchmark effort. This system includes:
• 32 (1.5 GHz) Integrity CPUs
• Two I/O Cabinets
• 16 dual-port A7012A Gigabit Ethernet Adapters
• 256 Gigabytes of physical RAM
• A single 128 Gigabyte data file
Client Systems
The client systems used to generate the I/O traffic during this benchmark were eighty (80) rx1620
systems running HP-UX 11i v2. Each client had two CPUs and two Gigabit Ethernet ports. This
effectively gave a total of 160 NFS/TCP connections to the server.
Benchmark Application
The application used to generate the NFS I/O requests is iozone. Iozone was run simultaneously on
the 80 NFS client systems and each client was configured to read from the same 128 Gigabyte file
on the NFS server. For information about iozone and how to use it, see: http://iozone.org
.
Fi
g
ure 1 – Inte
g
rity Superdome System Used Durin
g
Benchmark