The following guidelines and recommendations are included to assist in leveraging SmartConnect for optimal network connection balancing and performance:
- Connection speed (1Gb/s vs. 10Gb/s) has less impact on overall home-directory performance than the number of active users per node.
- For home-directory solutions utilizing a PowerScale storage cluster via NFSv3 protocol, connecting users via SmartConnect dynamic pools yields both the highest available throughput results and the highest level of availability in the event of a connection or path failure between cluster and node.
- SMB/NFSv4 protocol should use SmartConnect static pools to mount the cluster share, and leverage protocol level failover capability.