J
jkh
Guest
I can see exactly where you are coming from, and I'm guessing you work for ixsystem or a company providing similar type of product/services: enterprise class storage systems.
Full disclaimer: Yes, I do work for iXsystems!
The test I made were mostly for my own and typical immediate use: few users, NFS and windows clients. I won't use iscsci at home, nor will I use virtual environment: the projects I'm currently working on do not deal well without direct hardware access (and that includes mythtv and DVB/ATSC acquisition cards). I doubt anyone using freenas at home is going to care much about how it will behave with 500 simultaneous connections, and home users seem to be the greater percentage of freenas users.
Well, this is where things get kind of... complicated.
First off, really pushing filesystem benchmarks for a home user scenario is, as Josh indicated, already kind of pointless since once you've saturated a 1GbE interface all the performance in the world on your filesystem frankly won't matter since you can't GET to it at those data rates anyway. Most home users also just want to store their movies, music, backups, and other data which spends most of its time at rest, so again, if one particular kernel gives them 14% better theoretical throughput numbers that they'll never actually see any tangible benefit from, they just don't care! They just want that storage solution to be reliable and work when they need it, and most of their concerns (as Josh also pointed out) will be around "ease of use", not "raw blazing speed" (this is also why mom does not buy a Corvette Z06 to take the kids shopping in). That is an entirely different area of engineering endeavor, and one we actually value quite a bit since not just home users want a box to be easy to set up and use, so do many enterprise users, actually. Even the most savvy enterprise person has better things to do during the day, generally speaking, than geek out on some highly arcane interface that seems to enjoy making what should be fairly routine and simple tasks complex!
Second, and the reason "real world performance" can't simply be ignored in favor of ease of use, is that home users frequently turn into enterprise users, just as iPhones and iPods have been "invading" the workplace in record numbers. Something that works well at home becomes tempting to use at work, and then that very same software solution gets weighed on a different set of scales because at work, they DO have multiple 10GbE interfaces and hardware that costs 5-6 figures and can easily serve hundreds or even thousands of users. It's a tough line to walk, since the very same software is used in both scenarios - you don't get the luxury of focusing on just one narrow patch of the market.