There will be no router, just a switch connecting the various servers. The network will be dedicated to NFS, so other than competing NFS clients, there will be no network traffic to worry about.

Ben, thanks for mentioning your experiences with Sun equipment and the bit about your unconfigured switch. I'm the type to probably put the switch in place without configuring it (since it's such a simple network). I'll definitely take a look at the switch's config.

I'm considering buying our company some 10Gbps copper Ethernet equipment to provide a dedicated network for our NFSv4 server/clients.

We have fairly modern equipment (HP DL380 G7 server, DL360 G5 clients) with 10/15krpm SAS disks. I'm wondering what I should expect when comparing local disk performance to performance over a 10Gbps NFS network share.

Does anyone have experience with this equipment? Is there a reasonable way to know what to expect without having to buy the (very) expensive switch and I/O cards? I think the disks support at most 6Gbps throughput. Are there other bottlenecks that I should consider or is it reasonable to expect performance over NFS to be about as good as local disk performance?

Thanks.