Multi-Client SMB Performance
Sadly, these two charts don't show the time or effort that went into building our multi-client test. We have 120 virtual machines with a dedicated non-blocking gigabit Ethernet port for each. The VMs run on ten servers, each with two octa-core Xeons.
The workload run from each machine is a trace file of recorded Microsoft Office activity. This is a typical workload from an office environment with users opening, editing, building and saving Word, Power Point and Excel documents. Individual traces are not designed to stress the NAS, but when they're combined from multiple sources, we stress the system.
We expected the FreeNAS Mini to perform well in this test, but the system didn't live up to our expectations. We used its default compression settings and suspect the slight compression may not be the best choice for this environment. With six settings to choose from, we admittedly did not get a chance to test them all.
Still, with the cache drives enabled, the FreeNAS Mini delivers the second-best latency. Without it, the FreeNAS Mini encounters the highest delay.