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Windows 8/2012 Performance Tuning
Little performance running is required when using the recommended SMB3 protocol to connect Windows 8/2012 clients to Isilon –
The SMB stack is largely auto-tuning. In the advanced settings tab of the Windows driver properties, select the Performance Options
settings. The Transmit and Receive Buffer sizes may be increased from 512 to 4,096 bytes, assuming the computer is appropriately
equipped with at least 16-32 GB of RAM to handle bandwidth intensive applications. In some cases, the Interrupt Moderation Rate
may need to be set to “Disabled”.
Figure 2. Windows Driver Performance Options
The ATTO network interface has Receive Side Scaling (RSS) enabled, making it an ideal client interface for the SMB3 Multichannel
implementation in EMC Isilon OneFS version 7.1.1 and greater. SMB3 multichannel will perform single stream load balancing and
fault tolerance over multiple 10 GbE interfaces, assuming you have a 2 or 4 port enabled network interface. SMB3 multichannel load
balancing is completely independent of hardware load balancing protocols such as Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) and each
ATTO network interface should be configured independently with its own IP address.
SMB3 multichannel is enabled by default in OneFS version 7.1.1 and later, so you simply need to ensure that you are connecting
your Windows 8/2012 client to an Isilon node with dual 10 GbE interfaces configured for independent static IP addresses. SMB3
multichannel will automatically initiate a multi-10 GbE interface connection to the cluster once both 10 GbE interfaces are discovered
by the SMB3 multichannel capable client.
For optimal performance in media and entertainment workflows playing back 2K or 4K DPX or EXR image sequences, SMB3
multichannel may be combined with the EMC Isilon File Name Prefetch feature – enabled read speeds up to 1.4 GB/s to a single
Windows 8/2012 client from an X410 series cluster. For more information on the File Name Prefetch feature and accelerating the
RAM prefetch of sequentially named files, please see
Linux Client Performance Tuning
The ATTO FastFrame NIC should be natively supported by the kernel of most modern Linux distributions. For recommended NFS
mount parameters when using Linux with Isilon, please see EMC Isilon KB article 90041,
OneFS: Best practices for NFS client
