The trend of data intensive grid applications has brought grid storage protocols and servers into focus. The objective of this study is to gain an understanding of how time is spent in the storage protocols and servers. The storage protocols have a variety of tuning parameters. Some parameters improve single client performance at the expense of increased server load, thereby limiting the number of served clients. What ultimately matters is the throughput of the whole system. Some parameters increase the flexibility or security of the system at some expense. The objective of this study is to make such trade-offs clear and enable easy full system optimization.