Surely I should get better speeds than this. Running Xen 5.5 connecting back to open-e box that has 8 disks in raid6 with iscsi. The below tests were run within a VM.

vdb1:/home/icepick# time dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/1 count=500000
500000+0 records in
500000+0 records out
256000000 bytes (256 MB) copied, 5.75789 s, 44.5 MB/s

real 0m5.836s
user 0m0.360s
sys 0m5.108s
vdb1:/home/icepick# time dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/1 count=5000000
5000000+0 records in
5000000+0 records out
2560000000 bytes (2.6 GB) copied, 62.6363 s, 40.9 MB/s

real 1m2.717s
user 0m3.064s
sys 0m43.471s


open-e box has 4 gige interfaces running in bond, all disks are connected to a 3ware card