Re: 10GB Ethernet Cards

Sometimes I wonder if it's the hardware holding us back or the software.
What exactly is holding down speeds in an FTP session? Is it:
- disk I/O
- CPU utilization
- Lan adapter
- switch
- media
- the other end, for example, my pc

Or is it the OS? For example, if I had the same hardware, but running AIX
or Linux instead of i, would the transfer be faster?

IBM has made some adjustments to make file serving better. Back when they
supported IXS cards you could have the same iSeries but file serving
sucked. If you through in an IXS card it was WAY better. You were still
using the same disk drives, etc. Now, was it the offloading of processing
to the IXS card that really made the difference or was it the fact that
the IXS card was running Windows, which may be more geared to file serving
than i5/os was (at least at the time)?

Another example. IBM used to have ADSTAR for backing up client PC's and
servers on AS/400. It became Tivoli Storage Manager. In an effort to
reduce development costs they decided to run it in PASE. Turns out that
using PASE tape APIs were pathetic and made the back ups a lot slower.
They didn't go back to native. Instead they abandoned OS/400 and had you
migrate to Linux or AIX.

Those two example are just to show you that software can make the
difference.


Rob Berendt