DS Architecture - NFS vs. fiber channel?

hobocamp · Post by **hobocamp** » Fri Sep 28, 2012 2:50 pm

This will be is a general about architecture and the Infosphere environment.

At my company, we are in the process of upgrading from DS 8.0.1 to 8.7. At the same time, we are changing our basic architecture (which we've had in place for a number of years) from single to multiple servers (for failover capabilities, etc.)

Since we're now going to be using more than one server, we have to address shared file systems. We've worked with IBM to get an installation doc constructed, but I was wondering if anyone had experience with NFS vs. fiber channel. I know we can go either way with this, but was just curious to see what the practical experience had been using either, and if anyone had a strong preference for one vs. the other.

Thanks.

lstsaur · Post by **lstsaur** » Sat Sep 29, 2012 1:22 am

The cost of NFS is much cheaper than Fiber Channel. Ethernet-based NFS implementations are also typically cost-effective as they do not require special Fibre Channel SAN expertise. Also it's much easier to find the people with Ethernet knowledge. A lot of people are saying that NFS is slower than Fiber Channel; however I have figured out that using 10Gbits/sec Ethernet NFS can deliver the same performance level as Fibre Channel using identical hardware and test conditions.

I have built IIS 8.X on a high performance computing (GRID) Linux platform and the total costs is around $100,000. It will cost you at least 5 times more if using Fiber Channel SAN, AIX box.