Client/server data serving for high-performance computing

This paper will attempt to examine the industry requirements for shared network data storage and sustained highspeed (tens to thousands of megabytes per second) network data serving via the NFS and FTP protocol suite. It will discuss the current structural and architectural impediments to achieving these sorts of data rates cost-effectively on many general-purpose servers, and will describe an architecture and resulting product family that addresses these problems. We will show the sustained-performance levels that were achieved in the lab and discuss early customer experiences utilizing both the HIPPI-IP and ATM OC3-IP network interfaces.