[CentOS] Re: 10Gbit ethernet

[Kay Diederichs]

Jake Grimmett schrieb:
> If I could ask question about 10Gbit ethernet....
> 
> We have a 70 node cluster built on Centos 5.1, using NFS to mount user home 
> areas. At the moment the network is a bottleneck, and it's going to get worse 
> as we add another 112 CPUs in the form of two blade servers. 
> 
> To help things breath better, we are considering building three new NFS 
> servers, and connecting these and the blade servers directly via 10Gbit to a 
> new core switch, the older nodes will stay with 1Gbit ethernet, but be given 
> new switches uplinked via 10Gbit to the core switch.
> 
> Before I spend a great deal of money, can I ask if anyone here has experience 
> of 10GBit? Dell, HP, Supermicro, IBM (etc..) seem to be pushing the NetXen 
> PCIe cards, so I guess these drivers work...? As to media, although CX4 seems 
> cheaper than optical, I hear the cabling is nasty. And is the magical fairy 
> going to fix 10Gbit over cat6A anytime soon?
> 
> any thoughts appreciated.
> 
> Jake


Jake,

please note that the latest RedHat/CentOS-5.1 kernels have NFS 
performance issues - if these are (partly) responsible for the 
bottleneck then you may want to install a kernel which fixes the issue.

Check out RedHat bugzilla 321111.

HTH,

Kay