Most Efficient Network File sharing protocol?

[Dan Mossor]

On 02/28/2014 01:02 PM, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 28, 2014 at 5:13 PM, Mark Haney <mhaney at practichem.com> wrote:
>> On 02/28/14 12:07, Dan Mossor wrote:
>>> What do y'all consider the most efficient network file system? NFS?
>>> SMB? SFTP?
>
> Maybe you should outline your requirements a bit more. For example
> SFTP is not a filesystem, so are you only concerned about end-to-end
> transfer rates?
>
> poc
>
I am building an environment where I am setting up a local mirror for 
Fedora, CentOS, rpmfusion, and Ubuntu. I am using virtual machines to 
pull down the data and storing it on a local NAS device. Once a week, I 
am building a DVD of updates to transfer them to a disconnected system.

I am trying to determine the best access protocol for the VMs to reach 
the NAS. The NAS is not a true NAS device, it is an HP Proliant server 
with 8TB of storage running CentOS 6.5, so it can support any transfer 
method, including iSCSI. It is already running Samba to support our 
local Windows machines, and NFS for my work with Fedora and CentOS.

When the DVD is built, I pull the updates across the local network to my 
machine and build the DVD there. These <4GiB transfers sometimes take 
close to 3 to 4 hours using NFS, and it is a Gigabit network. rsync 
appeared to be a bit faster, but my goal is to find the most efficient 
transfer method to move lots of little -and some big - files across a 
local network.

I'm wondering about iSCSI - I haven't played with it much, maybe I'll 
test it out for this week's updates.

-- 
Dan Mossor
Systems Engineer at Large
Fedora QA Team Volunteer FAS: dmossor IRC: danofsatx
San Antonio, Texas, USA