Re: Performance and cheap storage

From: Greg A. Woods (no email)
Date: Tue Aug 01 2006 - 19:34:53 EDT

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    At Sat, 29 Jul 2006 20:07:12 -0500,
    Phil Brutsche wrote:
    >
    > Greg A. Woods wrote:
    > > not yet in smart controllers that simply make it look like a more
    > > traditional storage device thus off-loading all the protocol handling
    > > to a dedicated control processor
    >
    > I should point out that those controllers exist, but are rare and have
    > limited OS support: Adaptec's 7211C gigabit iSCSI HBAs
    > (http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/products/iscsi/) or QLogic's QLA4050C
    > iSCSI HBA (http://qlogic.com/products/iscsi_products_hba.asp), for example.

    That's good to hear! Thanks for the refs.

    > BTW, like most of Adaptec's other controllers the 7211[CF] is
    > effectively Windows-only, and the QLogic controller is very likely too
    > new to work with most platforms Cyrus runs on. It's not that the QLogic
    > card won't ever work with (say) FreeBSD, it's that FreeBSD's driver's
    > most likely aren't up-to-date enough to work with the card at this point.

    I'd be more inclined to think the QLogic card will be supported in *BSD
    systems sooner than the Adaptec. QLogic do have a good record of making
    their storage HBAs backwards compatible and their FC cards present a
    similar enough driver API as their SCSI cards for the same basic code to
    be used, but yeah I don't see any obvious support for the QL4xxx series
    cards yet (though there is mention of the 6312 and the 6322 FC-AL
    adapters).

    (There are hints around that Wasabi have done a proprietary NetBSD
    driver for the Adaptec 7211C, and apparently Adaptec's own RedHat
    drivers do include source code.)

    > Without one of those cards iSCSI is a CPU hog. Sadly, a second CPU (or
    > an upgrade to dual-core CPU) is cheaper...

    Is anyone here running enough concurrent IMAP/SSL connections to know if
    the SSL overhead chews up enough CPU to conflict with something like
    un-accellerated iSCSI (i.e. enough to also justify a crypto
    accellerator, perhaps as well as an iSCSI one)?

    -- 
    						Greg A. Woods
    H:+1 416 218-0098 W:+1 416 489-5852 x122 VE3TCP RoboHack <>
    Planix, Inc. <>       Secrets of the Weird <>
    ----
    Cyrus Home Page: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus
    Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyruswiki.andrew.cmu.edu
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