Designing A File Server With Best Price Performance?

A TOE card replaces the onboard NIC. I think you'll find things have
been approved.

I'm not sure I agree with your comment that you can't get CPU bound
with
file sharing, since I've seen plenty of really high-end file servers
that
cost hundreds of thousands of dollars get CPU-bound. But if I add
"for
twenty users" to the end of your sentence, then I'd agree with it.
I'm
guessing that's what you meant. Just wanted to clarify the point for
anyone
else who might be reading along.

Just curious were those CPU bound servers Solaris boxes that were
spawning
processes for each connected user? If the I/O is asynchronous and
you
limit the number of threads and processes that are being
context-switched,
you should bottleneck on I/O (file, network, or both) before you hit
any CPU limits. If you give the CPU hundreds of spawning processes,
then of
course you are going to overwhelm it at some point just in context
switches.
Fortunately, Windows server uses asynchronous file I/O.

Be careful, you could start a religious war with your comments.

But as long as you brought it up...

These were NAS filers that were specifically designed for file sharing
and nothing else, not Solaris boxes. Throw a few thousand users at
anything and it's bound to run out of room. Actually, I'd say that most
of the CPU in these cases is eaten up with making GbE frames, hence my
comment on TOEs.

As to OSs, I'd pit a Linux box running Samba against the exact same
hardware running Windows any day of the week. Add to that comment that
I don't know a single high-end NAS vendor that uses Windows as its base
OS. (Maybe because you don't have to reboot it all the time to install
the latest security patch.)