Tue Sep 14, 2010 6:14 pm
Assuming that the clients are different physical boxes, dedicate a port from your quad nic to each target. Just give each port a different ip address in windows. If your client(s) are on one physical box, then you will need a nic port on each target to get 4x 1GbE. Do this, use a write back cache (with 12GB RAM you can do 2-3GB cache per target!), and you should be able to max out at about 100MB/sec on each target.
If you only have two boxes, and both have quad port nics, then don't bother putting a switch between them. That will cut a tiny amount of latency out!
You could try MPIO to boost bandwidth, but this will only help with parallel i/o. E.g. if you have two paths between client and server, the most you'll see is about 100MB/sec when doing a single file copy, but you might be able to do two file copies at 100MB/sec each, on the same target.
