SUMMARY: Solbournes & Suns on FDDI

From: fed!m1rcd00@uunet.UU.NET
Date: Thu Apr 30 1992 - 15:58:47 CDT


My original question:

>Does anyone out there have Solbourne & Sun servers attached to FDDI
>networks? If so, I'd like to hear about your experiences. Information
>about controllers, software, and routers used would be appreciated.
>What kind of throughput do you get? How well does NFS scale to FDDI?
>What sorts of problems have you encountered?

Summary of responses:

I did not get any responses from customer sites that were doing this in
a business/production mode. I got a few responses from people who were
interested in doing or about to do this, and from other people also who
wanted me to summarize. If anyone really has a Sun, or especially a
Solbourne, up in production on an FDDI, I'd still like to hear from
you.

I did collect some information, however:

One response:

>The standard tcp packet size is fairly small -- 4 KB. Using that size,
>you get about the same through FDDI as you do through ethernet, due to
>the relatively hefty overhead of sending an FDDI message. You can up
>this to, say, 32 KB and get really good through-put (you can't specify
>the tcp message size on a per-interface basis, unfortunately). The
>joker is that this breaks some other vendors' tcp implementation,
>particularly IBM-PCish things. If you don't have to talk to PCs from
>the machine with the FDDI board, then up the size and be amazed.
>Otherwise, it's not worth getting.

Another respondant described a new configuration that they were using,
that had a server and clients on two sides of a Cisco-router based FDDI
network. None of the computers were directly attached to the FDDI. He
reported some difficulties related to NIS binding accross routers, and
some spurious problems with packet loss between the two Ciscos.

I also learned (through other channels) that Solbourne now has an FDDI
controller available for purchase. It will be demonstrated at Interop
Spring '92. It is purported to be quite fast.

Thanks to everyone who responded.

Bob Drzyzgula
Federal Reserve Board
rcd@fed.frb.gov



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