[David Laster]

Honestly I don’t think it is too complex to split data up over multiple connections but most protocol stacks don’t support it. Have you played around with NFS? It creates more packets than SMB/AFP that can potentially be load balanced. You can run the daemon on the mac and it is built into Mac OS X Server. This may work well with standard link aggregation if you can find out how to do that on a mac. Another thing with ISIS is that

Do you have access to an ISIS 5000? I’m sure you could learn a lot about how things work by running Wireshark on a client and try copying some text files. Do a netstat -all in the terminal as well.

I forgot to mention too that my machines are using regular 1500 MTU packets not “Jumbo Frames”

The theoretical limit for Gig E is 125 MB/sec, so there is still a bit of room beyond the ISIS 5000’s performance.

David Laster
NYC Post Production Consultant

[David Laster]

Hi Bob,
I use an ISIS 5000 and get 175MB/s writes and 145 MB/s reads on a single chassis, and could potentially achieve even more with multiple chassis. My client system is an 8-core Nehalem Mac with the built-in NIC. I tested this with Avid’s disk testing tool PathDiag and verified it looking at Activity Monitor and iStat Menus. I get about 95 MB/s on one adapter and 50 MB/s on the other for reads. The system is NOT link-aggregated, instead the two adapters have IPs on the same subnet and traffic is distributed between adapters connecting to the server.

The ISIS has its own (2.2 Megabyte) kernel extension, uses its own communication protocol over IP and even has its own file system. They seem to have developed a lot of “secret sauce” to make it function more like a SAN than a NAS. This is different than other products that that are basically made by VARs utilizing SMB/AFP/NFS (editshare comes to mind here) or more complex systems on the sever side (like Isilon) that still utilize standard client software. ISIS (7000) up to at least version 2 used OSR’s File System Development Kit in part for their file system.

There is very little public information on how things are supposed to be set up in a dual environment, but it does seem to work as advertised.

David Laster
NYC Post Production Consultant