Balancing Bandwidth for PFS Performance

When deciding where to place storage devices, it is important to balance the bandwidth of the storage device with the bandwidth of the network interface. For example, in a cluster running on switched FastEthernet, the bandwidth out of any node is limited to 100 Mbits/s.

A single SPARC Storage Array (SSA) can generate more than twice that bandwidth. Since the network is effectively half the bandwidth of the node, adding a second SSA to the node will not lead to any improvement in performance. On the other hand, adding an SSA to a node that is not currently being used as a PFS server may well boost the overall PFS performance.