Isilon SMB Share performance

i don't really understand the question. But what maybe was meant is, that you should not do your Permission Management over the Share-Permissions but over NTFS permissions on the Folders. This is a (MS-) Best Practice since this prevents users accessing over other Shares or local paths.

Also i *could* imagine, that you have more metadata traffic if you use ACLs in comparison to using only unix-perms. but this should not have any measurable Performance Impact. (imho)

also massively spreaded / variable permissions under ABE-enabled Shares can cause higher CPU-load

This is a good question and one almost everyone has when first working with networked shares and NTFS permissions.  Keep in mind these are both separate and needed controls to safeguard files stored on a networked file system.  The share is given a name and also is assigned permissions for a user or a group. When the share is entered [using verified logon credentials] the share takes us to a folder that has NTFS permissions. Folder (container) permissions and file (object) permissions are in the form of Access Control Entries (ACE's) that comprise the Access Control List (ACL).  The most restrictive permission (from the share or the ACL) is used to allow access to a folder or file.  Since the above permissions are required for every share, folder and file -- one can argue there are no real performance considerations.  Management of the shares and disk folders/files is always a major concern to Network Administrators.  In general, having home shares for each user and also having department related shares, and maybe some specialty shares make things easy to manage.  I have found that making Active Directory (AD) groups and placing users in that group makes it very simple.  For example, I can make an AD group called Marketing, place all the employees from the marketing department in the group, create a share called Mrkdept and add the Marketing group to the share and give full access.   If this share points to /ifs/data/syszone/marketing folder, I can give the NTFS permission for the Marketing group the read/write/execute permissions and also give Domain Administrators full permission.  Inheritance gives the ability for the permissions to be added to new files and folders as they get created.  So in summary, if we see how permissions work, we understand performance is really not a factor.  What can be a factor is the number of shares, the number of folders/files and the size of the files.  Again, this is normally not an issue until the numbers get very high.  I hope this helps sort out the issue on shares.

> I had someone tell me that the Isilon will assign more disks/performance if you put ntfs permissions on the SMB share created rather than the sub folders.

Great comments from sleutze and others, but I just wanted to comment on the this sentence.  Today there is no ability in OneFS to partition performance in this way, at least directly and at the granularity you're implying.  Those are features for a later OneFS release.