Not to sound like an ass:D but can you back that up? I've read quite the opposite. Granted there has been some glitches in some of the serverworks chipsets, but nothing that would hinder its performance signifcantly. If anything I have seen numerous performance benchmarks comparing the high end (intel) p3 x86 motherboards like the 820 and GX and it can't come close to what the low end serverworks chipsets could produce for bandwidth.
I am curious to see what type of problems you had because prior to the new xeon chipsets that came out serverworks was about the best thing for the p3 server line, which handed out the capabilites of being able to keep up with gigabit and fibre channel HBA. The above link was given to test throughput capabilities for the HBA adapters. It really tests the motherboards PCI bus capabilities.
As far as GB Ethernet sure you can fill up the pipe with multiple file transfers, or mulitplie clients hitting hard off an interface, but my goal was to fill the pipe with a single file transfer so that you can achieve maximum throughput when you need it. Also I think Jumbo frames are going to be more important once 10G rolls out. I think there will very little benfit of 10G unless they implement jumbo frames. I guess I have done a fair amount of testing and tweaking to try to achieve this without jumbo frames and the results have been less than great. We will how much of a difference jumbo frames make in the weeks to come.
I'm curoius to see which platform you got your specs off of and what type of machine your client and server is running.
As for expensive 64/66 PCI motherboards, well you wont find them in the P4. Let alone PCI-X. The p3 variety can be found on ebay pretty easily. Shoot I picked up a cheapie serverworks chipset(granted no grand champion but had 2 64bit/66mhz pci slots for 40 bucks new) Search around on the web or ebay and you will find them. Its a shame that the new p4 boards do not have them, but I think pci Express is going to be the shuffled in to fill the void for PCI bus bandwidth. But look at alot of the current integrated gigabit chips on the motherboads they sit generally on their own 64bit/66mhz pci bus, but of course they do not have any further PCI slot interfaces to support addition devices. These devices if intel or broadcom can support jumbo frames, which I think is crucial to filling the pipe on gigabit.
I was the freak that went crazy over this switch. I currently have the 3524xl, 3508G and now the SMC8508T, and neither one of the Cisco switches can support jumbo frames. Cisco allows you to adjust the MTU on both of the switches to 2000 but no where near 9K. Performance really blew where I would be lucky to push 30MB/s with an Intel Pro1000F Gigabit cards and running on a server with a 64bit/66mhz PCI bus on a supermicro serverworks chipset motherboard. The server was raided up with 5 X 120GB 7200 RPM WD drives on a 3ware 7512 escalade controller. Continous Disk read throughput was well over 100MB/s let alone write performance was above 60MB/s.
Although I am a Cisco whore, I was pretty disappointed to find the feature of jumbo frames reserverd for the beloved 6500 series switches. I thought for sure I could not get this feature unless I shelled out over 10K for some higher end switch. Well a ray of light appeared crusing the net for my iScsi project I discoved the SMC switch supported jumbo frames. Woot Woot! Sure it unmanaged but for the price you can't beat it. I'm curious to see how much of a real world difference the jumbo frames will make on my iScsi throughput testing on various linux, netware, and windows platforms.
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Not to sound like an ass :D
f .h tml
but can you back that up?
I've read quite the opposite. Granted there has been some glitches in some of the serverworks chipsets, but nothing that would hinder its performance signifcantly. If anything I have seen numerous performance benchmarks comparing the high end (intel) p3 x86 motherboards like the 820 and GX and it can't come close to what the low end serverworks chipsets could produce for bandwidth.
http://www.conservativecomputer.com/myrinet/per
I am curious to see what type of problems you had because prior to the new xeon chipsets that came out serverworks was about the best thing for the p3 server line, which handed out the capabilites of being able to keep up with gigabit and fibre channel HBA. The above link was given to test throughput capabilities for the HBA adapters. It really tests the motherboards PCI bus capabilities.
As far as GB Ethernet sure you can fill up the pipe with multiple file transfers, or mulitplie clients hitting hard off an interface, but my goal was to fill the pipe with a single file transfer so that you can achieve maximum throughput when you need it. Also I think Jumbo frames are going to be more important once 10G rolls out. I think there will very little benfit of 10G unless they implement jumbo frames. I guess I have done a fair amount of testing and tweaking to try to achieve this without jumbo frames and the results have been less than great. We will how much of a difference jumbo frames make in the weeks to come.
I'm curoius to see which platform you got your specs off of and what type of machine your client and server is running.
As for expensive 64/66 PCI motherboards, well you wont find them in the P4. Let alone PCI-X. The p3 variety can be found on ebay pretty easily. Shoot I picked up a cheapie serverworks chipset(granted no grand champion but had 2 64bit/66mhz pci slots for 40 bucks new)
Search around on the web or ebay and you will find them. Its a shame that the new p4 boards do not have them, but I think pci Express is going to be the shuffled in to fill the void for PCI bus bandwidth. But look at alot of the current integrated gigabit chips on the motherboads they sit generally on their own 64bit/66mhz pci bus, but of course they do not have any further PCI slot interfaces to support addition devices. These devices if intel or broadcom can support jumbo frames, which I think is crucial to filling the pipe on gigabit.
Glad to hear my buddy gave me props from above.
+1 karma for Retro!
I was the freak that went crazy over this switch. I currently have the 3524xl, 3508G and now the SMC8508T, and neither one of the Cisco switches can support jumbo frames. Cisco allows you to adjust the MTU on both of the switches to 2000 but no where near 9K. Performance really blew where I would be lucky to push 30MB/s with an Intel Pro1000F Gigabit cards and running on a server with a 64bit/66mhz PCI bus on a supermicro serverworks chipset motherboard. The server was raided up with 5 X 120GB 7200 RPM WD drives on a 3ware 7512 escalade controller. Continous Disk read throughput was well over 100MB/s let alone write performance was above 60MB/s.
Although I am a Cisco whore, I was pretty disappointed to find the feature of jumbo frames reserverd for the beloved 6500 series switches.
I thought for sure I could not get this feature unless I shelled out over 10K for some higher end switch. Well a ray of light appeared crusing the net for my iScsi project I discoved the SMC switch supported jumbo frames. Woot Woot! Sure it unmanaged but for the price you can't beat it. I'm curious to see how much of a real world difference the jumbo frames will make on my iScsi throughput testing on various linux, netware, and windows platforms.