TOE Adapter on Target - Any Benefit?

[haasd]

We are currently building our first StarWind storage HA nodes. In configuring the Dell PowerEdge Server options, one is to include NIC's with TOE iSCSI. As a iSCSI target, does or is there any benefit to paying for this with StarWind? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. We're trying to make these boxes scream with performance.

[anton (staff)]

TOE (TCP Offload Engine) built-in into NIC silicon reduces CPU utilization greatly. I would not mess with iSCSI offload engines as they are too expensive and bad value for money these days but TOE definitely costs what's asked for it.

P.S. And it's pretty hard to find any network card w/o at least minimal TOE (checksums and large segments offload) today.

We are currently building our first StarWind storage HA nodes. In configuring the Dell PowerEdge Server options, one is to include NIC's with TOE iSCSI. As a iSCSI target, does or is there any benefit to paying for this with StarWind? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. We're trying to make these boxes scream with performance.