That's a tremendous improvement. Obviously, I don't know the particulars of your situation but are you planning to update to more current hardware? The 5300 Cloverton was 65nm process and 2006 era. I'd be curious about the effect of using the 3.2+ kernel on the new e5-2600 Sandybridge process.
We have a new cluster that's intended to replace the current one, which as you point out is running on 2006 hardware. (It still performs extremely well, however.)
Those numbers would presumably translate pretty well to newer CPUs as the numbers reflect the change in read I/O. Newer CPUs would handle the load faster, but the read traffic would be the same.
