NFS In A Disk Write Intensive Environment?

tolldog asks: "At Big Idea Productions, a 3D animation studio, we are looking at ways of improving our network and I/O performance. We have been toying with the idea of loadbalancing the NFS server over multiple machines. We have also thought about buying one large machine with several interfaces. What are the advantages and drawbacks of these methods? Are there other approaches that could work?"

"We will probably be going from a gigabit backbone to gigabit to all of the clients, so network speed will be less of a concern than I/O over NFS. Currently we have a 4 proc Origin serving our filespace with a mixture of SGI workstations and Linux render boxes all mounting the same space. The SGI boxes are mostly reads with a few writes when saving files. The Linux boxes are mostly writes, all over NFS2, with large reads at the begining to get the textures and models loaded into memory."