Network Speed Issues, C6100 and P4300 G2

Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.

mason736

Member
Mar 17, 2013
111
1
18
I finally got my home network setup, and I'm having a bit of an issue with bandwidth. I flashed firmware on my router (wndr3700) to load OpenWRT, which gave me the ability to support VLANs, thus creating two separate subnets, going to two switches, one dedicated to SAN traffic, the other for everything else. Then I setup the C6100, and the P4300 SAN, loading ws2012 essentials on node one, and dedicated 2 of the 4 NICs (I added a 2port Intel NIC card) to the SAN traffic switch, and the other two going into the general traffic switch. I also created a NIC Bond on the P4300, and have that running into the SAN Switch. I setup LACP on both switches (Cisco SG200-26, and SG200-50), to enable NIC teaming.

Traffic flows from the P4300 G2 and the ws2012e node via iSCSI, and at a decent rate (135-150MB/s). The problem comes when I want to transfer data from the iSCSI share, to one of the other nodes of the C6100. The other nodes have a mapped drive to the ws2012e, as to avoid any kind of file lock or conflicting issues on data. IF I transfer a movie or file from the mapped drive to the HDD of the other node, network transfer speeds only hit around 45-50 MB/s, significantly slower. I can see the traffic is hitting both network teams on the ws2012e box, so I know its not going back to the router, and coming back down the pipe, but I didn't realize I would lose 50% of my bandwidth just hopping from one NIC team to the other on the same node.

Any advice?
 

mrkrad

Well-Known Member
Oct 13, 2012
1,244
52
48
Sounds like you need a hardware offload assist nic (like newer SR-IOV 10gbps nic's) which can short-circuit the traffic from leaving the nic and going to the switch.
 

mason736

Member
Mar 17, 2013
111
1
18
i ordered an intel quad port VT nic card. I'm just going to use the 2 1gig onboard nics for management. We will see if this helps. I was able to increase the throughput from the P4300 g2 MDL to 190-200 MB/s by enabling DSM and MPIO over the iSCSI connection. I'd love to see those speeds going out from the NIC as well, instead of just coming in.