Large Single File Issue

I am wondering if anyone has found a workaround or if Open-E has created a patch for the DSS 5.0up62.7101.3518 when transferring a singe large files > 10GB over SMB. I have spent over 24 hours on this issue to no avail. I have done large amount of work to try to insolate the issue and have created a list of tests that I have run to narrow the issue down to a software issue.


In order to test to insure that it is not a hardware issue I have setup two different hardware setups, one with physical hardware and the other a virtual hardware environment.

Hardware Tests:

Hardware Setup:
Tyan Tiger i7320 Mainboard
- Xeon 2.8GHz 800FSB CPU
- 2GB of DDR-2 400
- Dual onboard Broadcom BCM5721 NICs
- Singe Intel PRO1000 Fiber NIC
- 1 400GB SATA disk drive

In this test I tried both the official USB device and a USB DOM that I loaded the demo onto. I set the Broadcom up for both single link and I 802.3AD the links together. To rule out a issue with the network cards, I installed a Intel PRO 1000 network card and disabled the onboard Broadcoms.

Virtual Server Setup.

VMware workstation 7
-3.6GHz Dual Virtual CPUs
-1GB Virtual RAM
-Intel Pro1000 compatible virtual network adaptor
-1GB Boot Virtual disk
-20GB Data Virtual disk

In this test I created a 1GB VMDK (VMware Disk) file and installed the software my mounting it and formatting with FAT32 and then coping the files to the volume, afterward running the bootinst.exe to make the volume bootable. Then the file was attached to a VM and a separate 20GB VMDK was added to the VM for storage.

Software setup for both servers:
All settings were default, network was setup statically.
Created a volume group (VG01) on unit (S001) then created a new NAS volume (lv0000) on the volume for the entire size. Under NAS resources I created a share called “share” (/lv0000/share) and then enabled it for guest. Browsed to the file server (\\DSS\Share) and copied a few smaller files = 10GB. So far all is well. Now I put down a 4GB file to the share. The DSS server hard drive is on solid but no data is being transferred over the network (Confirmed in task manager under networking). After about ~30 seconds the file will transfer with the light on the storage server blinking normally for that type of transfer. Ok so it just took a longer time for that file. Next transfer a 8GB ISO file, it sits for about ~60 seconds and then give a error saying “Cannot copy DVD.ISO: The specified network name is no longer available” The same event was happing during this time as well. The hard drive light is on solid and no network traffic is happing. Please note that this is on both the physical and virtual environments.

It is very easy to reproduce this issue and anyone that would like the VMDK files I would be willing to upload the one running the demo copy.

Note: These same files have been copied to a windows 2003 server, a windows 2008 server and a much older Open E Enterprise NAS with out any issues. Also the files have been copied from windows XP, Vista, & Windows 2008 computers.

My thoughts: I believe that the DSS software is trying to confirm the sectors on the disk before it wrights the data and that is why it takes longer based on the size of the file. Servers with very fast arrays or FC attached disks may not see this issue because the disks are so fast that it would take an extremely large file to have it time out.

I hope someone can help with this issue, my work in tales large video files sometime over 100GB and I would really like to be able to use this software for that purpose.

Here are other posts on the Forum of people have the similar issues:
http://forum.open-e.com/showthread.p...ht=large+files
http://forum.open-e.com/showthread.p...ht=large+files
http://forum.open-e.com/showthread.p...ht=large+files


Thanks
Dave Anderson
Dave@Andersonnetworks.net