Hi

I'm the guy who had loads of memory en dual quad 5335.
After a few weeks of testing my findings about this are that open-e or the iscsi target that is used (iscsitarget)
  • does not use more than one CPU
  • and when using blockio memory is not used because filesystem cache is bypassed


In all my tests i've never seen the cpu usage go above 100%, ( with 8 cpu's you can go to 800%) i've seen it.
blockio is the current default and fileio is unusable because of initialization failing after 3 iscsi volumes.

My advise is to go for with and
  • a fast dual single core machine
  • 2~4 GB of memory
  • a good raid controller ( i use a areca 1230ML 12 disk )
  • good ethernet controllers ( dual intel server e1000 )


when reading large chunks of data from the open-e san i get the bonded dual e1000 full ( 200+ Mb/s)
when writing large chunks of data to the open-e san I get 100Mb/s
when reading & writing I get on 1 interface i get 100Mb in and out of it, using the full duplex