Hello. I'm trying to find a solution that would work for me. I need a
file sever that would work for about 40 different nodes. Those nodes
might need large amounts of data at the same time (like 30 computers
trying go retrieve 500 MB of data each, that data is scattered in coule
hundreds of files), those peaks don't happen very often but there is a
general tendency of having new connections happening simultaneously.
Currently I have linux box serving samba to windows nodes but I can't
find any solution go give any load balancing for my connections. I use
gigabit ethernet and at some times it chokes my file server (not it's
disks, not it's cpu but it's network). I was wondering on some solutions
that would use multiple network cards from one fileserver. It would be
possible for me to change other nodes from windows to linux (but no
solaris please) so linux to linux solutions are welcome (linux to
windows would be perfect). I found some infomations about NFS v4.1 but
it might be an overkill for my situation (having multiple servers
working as one).

I hope that you can give me some advice in my situation.

Kuba