This paper gives throughput and latency figures achieved using 10 GbE using Linux clients. Their tests showed a 300% improvement in latency over 1GbE. This whitepaper was published in 2003 by LANL.
Initial End-to-End Performance Evaluation of 10-Gigabit Ethernet�

Papers are available from the recent FAST (File And Storage Technologies) on their site. Rik pointed me to a particularly interesting paper on how Data Domain are able to achieve inline de-duplication.  It seems that they really are focussed on backup only, and the techniques probably wouldn’t work nearly as well for applications that do not stream data to the device.

Here’s a blog post by a guy at Sun which goes into very deep detail on what happens when a read() is done against a file on an NFS filesystem. Amongst other things it explains, why we see GETATTR’s turn up at the NFS server, even when the attributes should be cached locally (the answer is that a GETATTR is performed at file open() time regardless of the timeouts on the attribute cache) There is a 40 page PDF document linked to the post.

http://blogs.sun.com/vallishguru/entry/solaris_kernel_nfs_client_s

So I finished Freakonomics in just over a day. This is pretty impressive for me since , most of the time I fall asleep before I’ve finished the second page of any book I try to read. Anyhow i was surprised how much I enjoyed the book, and how applicable it was to what we do as engineers every day; which is to sift through lots of data looking for the clue that will give the answer to the problem at hand. Often we’re looking at the same data that other engineers have seen and try to interpret the data in a different way, or indeed look at data which has previously been overlooked. In the case of Freakonimics the data is not code, errors or performance statistics, but nor is it about ‘monetary’ data. It’s Sumo wrestlers win/lose ratios against same opponents (looking for corruption in Sumo) and other stuff too like ‘why do drug dealers still live with their mums?’. Entertaining, and well worth a read.