In 628986 we hit an issue where FTP load spiked very high, and because of the connections between stage/FTP, this caused new builds to fail to upload. I don't know enough about the systems to suggest a solution, but the tree closing due to a spike in downloads is really bad.

Doesn't bug 614786 help here ? IIRC it movies firefox builds off the eqllogic storage and back onto netapp, which we can then mount directly on stage. NFS load on the netapp can still hurt but at least there's not a dependency on dm-ftp01.

Yes, that's exactly what that bug is trying to accomplish is breaking the insane link between stage and ftp.