Adaptec ASA-7211C iSCSI Card and Adaptec iSA 1500 Storage ArrayYou may be as curious to find out what the performance difference is between the software-based Microsoft iSCSI initiator and a hardware-based iSCSI card. In theory an iSCSI card is supposed to avoid excessive CPU utilisation. We were going to test this out. Adaptec sent us an Ethernet over copper-based iSCSI card, which uses an onboard processor to process iSCSI functions for a complete TCP/ IP offload.
We installed this card and drivers, which was easy enough to do. The drivers place an additional icon in the Windows Control Panel so you can go in and configure the card and add targets. We set the Snap Server as a target by giving it an IP address. (The Adaptec card can also scan for targets if you don't know the IP address of your target.) From here we expected to be able to login to the Snap Server. After thinking we had done something wrong during the install, we discovered that the Snap Server will only work with software initiators and TOE cards and not with true iSCSI cards. We really didn't have enough time to get a TOE card and run some tests, so unfortunately we couldn't do much with the Adaptec iSCSI card.
An engineer over at Adaptec informed us on that company's most recent arrival, the iSA-1500 external storage array. It acts as a true iSCSI target. The product has been available in the US for some time now and has only just hit our shores in the last few weeks. It comes in a 1RU form factor with four SATA drives (1TB) and is designed for small businesses and remote offices looking for a cost effective shared storage solution. It's a little more expensive than the Snap Appliance Server, but it's a true iSCSI target; together with iSCSI cards it should prove to be a fast and cost efficient storage system. Hopefully we get a look at one of these and compare it back to the Snap Appliance Server using TOE cards.
Vendor: Adaptec
Phone: 02 8875 7874
Web: www.adaptec.com.au
Price: interface card AU$999.90; disk array approx AU$15,000
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