Help with config

[JEREMY_FREEMAN]

We are trying to spec out a NFS storage solution for user home directories in our company. I have been unable to get a clear answer from our reseller though on how many IOPS their devices will accommodate.

We plan on switching our 50 OSX desktops to network home directories. We setup a test NFS server on Linux and migrated 5 people to network home directories to get some IOPS measurements from the clients. The 5 clients we have migrated over idle at a combined 100 IOPS and occasionally peak to 800. If we load the filer down with heavy IO, the desktop clients exhibit odd behavior. It seems OSX does not gracefully handle home directories not being readily writable/readable.

Extrapolating this usage pattern out to 50 desktops, one can assume the idle traffic will be around 1000 IOPS with peaks up to 3 to 4k. Most vendors are clueless when it comes to OSX in enterprise, so are of no help really. They provided the following NetApp configuration that fits in our budget ($30k) and they claim will "have no problem whatsoever":

NetApp 2240 Cluster includes: - 18 x 1TB SATA disks (18TB RAW or 12TB Usable) - 6 x 100GB SSD Cache Pool) - CIFS/NFS/ISCSI/FCP Bundle - 7x 24 Parts delivery (4hrs) and phone support - Installation and configuration

Does anyone have any opinions on this configuration based on our requirements?

Thanks for reading

[lyons]

Jeremy,

I cross-posted your question to a community forum that covers file services - see the link below.

https://communities.netapp.com/thread/28084

You should receive an answer if you follow that discussion thread.

Thanks,

Jim

[shane_bradley]

The reason you're probably getting unhelpful answers is probably because the question you're asking isn't that easy. There are a number of factors that can have an impact on the number of IOP's a box can handle, and its dependant on a lot of factors for instance what sort of I/O you're actually doing, how big the working set is etc.

In saying that assuming your workload was small enough to fit mostly into the flashpool space you have, i would expect the I/O you could get off that box would be more than enough.