Theoretical Samba File Server

[Gerald Combs]

If you're concerned about the network being a bottleneck, why not use Fast
EtherChannel or gigabit ethernet?  Fast EtherChannel lets you bond up to
four 100 Mbps ethernet connections.  Its configuration is described in
Documentation/networking/bonding.txt in your kernel source tree.  GigE
cards can be had for less than $200 these days (copper and fiber).

What sort of switches were you going to buy?  Most "real" switches have
enough backplane bandwidth to support several gigabits/sec worth of
concurrent connections, so buying a dedicated switch for each connection
might be overkill.  By "real" switch I mean ones that are
manageable/configurable and whose manufacturers actually publish things
like backplane speeds.

On Sat, 27 Oct 2001, Steven L. Brendtro wrote:

> I am researching to build a killer linux file server.  Here is what I am
> thinking:
> 
> Dual Athlon box with ICP Vortex RAID card, 7 or so 36GB LVD/160 Hard drives,
> 1 GB ram, etc.  I have multiple users who will need to simultaneously
> sustain a throughput over the network of around 10MB/sec (80 Mbit/sec).
> This is close to saturating a 100Mbit/sec network interface.
> 
> With an ICP card maintaining random access throughput of over 200 MB/sec,
> and the only bottleneck in the network cards, I was considering installing
> multiple network interfaces on the server, say 4 of them.  Each of these
> will be connected to a dedicated switch, each to a dedicated workstation.
> >From there the switches will make connection back to a local area network.
> I will then run multiple SAMBA daemons, each with thier own unique netbios
> server name (FILESRV1, FILESRV2, etc.), but each having share names that
> point to the same mount point on the file system.
> 
> With this setup, I theoretically should be able to draw around 80 Mbit/sec
> per interface.
> 
> My question is this.  Does anyone see any problems inherent to this setup?
> Could I possibly run into problems with SAMBA sending too much broadcast
> traffic, reducing the throughput for my other network segments on the same
> box?
> 
> Any comments/suggestions are welcome.
> 
> Thanks,
> Steven Brendtro
> 
> 
> 
> 
>