We have some new NetApp FAS980 boxes which came in couple of weeks back. Today we did some performance testing on it . We created a volume on the filer and mounted it under nfs on seven linux nodes of a cluster. Then we used lmdd to simultaneously write files to the filer.lmdd is a cool utility to do this kind of benchmarking. It works like dd but its output gives timing statistics after completing. Could not really find much documentation on lmdd except the man pages hosted on its homepage.
We used psh to run lmdd simultaneously on the cluster nodes. PSH is part of xCAT(Extreme Cluster Administration Toolkit). It seems like its underlying architecture is ssh but you can specify node range(I guess xCAT specific) and it runs simultaneously on all the nodes given. hmmm interesting.