Power Series Iris as NFS file server?

[Mike Muuss]

At BRL we have just started using some of our 4D/280 machines as NFS
file servers (in addition to being compute servers, which is what they
are for).  It works very well, and subjectively "feels" very fast
(for NFS).

Our configuration will have >35 clients (mainly 4D/240 machines) served
by about 6 servers (4D/280 and 4D/240 each with 8x1.2 Gbyte drives).
We run the clients in "dataless" mode, ie, no home directories on the
SCSI disk, only root, /tmp, swap, and /usr.  No backups on clients,
daily backups on all servers using DUMP/RESTORE, three full cycles of
dump tapes retained on each server (one offsite).

In practice, NFS performance is quite acceptable for most tasks.
A few data-intensive operations we perform by opening a window on the
server and running the command there.  The most notable example of this
is using AR to build a 2.5 Mbyte library -- it goes about 3X faster
when run on the server -vs- over NFS.  (The issue is NFS synchronous writes,
stdio buffersize selection, and AR stupidity about quantity of excess I/O).

I have no hard numbers on NFS performance;  I'm too busy (and sufficiently
happy) to bother with an NFSTONE test or equiv.
	Best,
	 -Mike