More TCP Offload Than You Can Shake a TOE At!
Last week, Alacritech (one of our Scalable Networking partners) made a pretty big announcement around expanded support for our TCP Chimney Offload architecture:
"Neat!" is what you're likely saying as you parse the press release and I would agree.
The release hit the wires a half-a-week prior to the start of Spring'07 edition of Storage Networking World down in sunny San Diego.
QUICK SIDEBAR (Courtesy of Windows Sidebar): Just to prove the point of the "sunny San Diego" bit above, here is a screen shot of the current weather conditions in Redmond vs. San Diego at the time I am writing this post. As you can see, we here in Redmond, WA are facing a mind blowing 50 degree, "partly cloudy" day while the folks in S.D. are suffering through 60 and sunny. Poor, poor fools.
Back to business. The reason I mention that SNW thingy is the fact Alacritech has (besides a new spiffy look and brand) support for iSCSI acceleration that is compatible with our TCP Chimney Offload architecture (like the one found in the Scalable Networking Pack for WS03 and the recently released Server Pack 2 for WS03). Storage workloads on Windows Server (like file serving) is an area that can greatly benefit from network offload, and as you'll see in the near future, this is something Alacritech and Microsoft have been working to articulate (read: stay tuned for more details).
Nevertheless, I recommend you checkout the new line of Alacritech SNA and iSNA NICs (with their Dynamic TCP Offload Technology). If you're already using their gear, you should download this latest 9.1 driver that adds deeper support for our TCP Chimney Offload architecture.
Enjoy!