Keeping storage on its TOEs

This week I’m putting Alacritech in the spotlight. Its new iSCSI host bus adapter, SES1001T, promises to challenge competing products with faster performance, improved reliability and smooth deployment at an affordable price.

In case you just returned from a long mission to Mars, let me quickly introduce Alacritech. Led by founder, president, and CEO Larry Boucher — who also successfully created Auspex and Adaptec — Alacritech is a relatively young company focusing on accelerating TCP/IP data transfers.

Probably the most compelling reason to adopt iSCSI for your storage network is that it doesn’t require a specialized HBA or network to connect storage devices such as Fibre Channel.

In fact, you can use a plain GbE NIC (network interface card) and install free iSCSI initiator software, like the one offered by Microsoft, to reach any storage target in your Ethernet network. However, using plain NICs can create a significant burden on your servers’ CPUs because of the additional overhead generated processing the TCP protocol stack for each I/O operation.

To avoid that CPU overload, you can use iSCSI HBAs instead of plain GbE NICs. These adapters have onboard chips called TOE (TCP Offload Engine) that, as the name suggests, remove most of the TCP stack processing from the server’s CPU, freeing more resources for local applications and preventing a possible server meltdown.

Purchasing an iSCSI HBA with TOE can cost as much as $1,000. And to be safe, plan on purchasing two. Now you’re facing an interesting dilemma: to invest that money in adapters or to use it as a down payment for a server with faster or additional processors.

Depending on your servers and applications, the answer to that quandary may vary. To help make up your mind, browse the Alacritech Web site where you’ll find some technical odes to David Letterman’s Top 10 lists, including the 10 most compelling reasons why you should use a TOE on your servers.

I digress. Back to the SES1001T. This new HBA comes in two models, for twisted-pair and Fibre cabling, both promising data transfers at the speed of wire and zero impact on your host processing power thanks to its ASIC-based TOE. Both models have competitive suggested prices: $600 for copper and $700 for Fibre.

With that price, Alacritech is obviously betting that customers will like the SES1001T more than competitors’ solutions. They are backing that wager by publishing benchmark results on its Web site that compare the unit performance and reliability with similar Adaptec and Intel products.

Unless bias is proven, those results should give Alacritech some edge, at least for customers running Microsoft Windows servers, the only platform that the SES1001T currently supports.

Quite interestingly, Alacritech has another treat for Windows users: The new adapter integrates with the Microsoft iSCSI initiator, which is good, because it consolidates iSCSI management on a single GUI. Other HBA products have their own proprietary interface.

Wherever you stand on iSCSI storage, you should give the new Alacritech adapter some thought. Moreover, if you started already using a simple NIC and the free Microsoft initiator, moving to the SES1001T should be a breeze.