In 2003 Info-Tech Research Group called TCP/IP Offload Engines (TOEs) a "technology to watch" as enterprises looked to adopt Ethernet-based IP SANs. For a number of reasons TOEs have not taken the networked storage world by storm. However, as IP SANs begin a new 10 Gigabit chapter, IT decision-makers will need to take a new look at TOEs.

Relieve Processing Overhead

In a typical IP SAN, SCSI storage traffic is encapsulated in TCP/IP packets and transported over Ethernet between host (server) and target (storage). A TOE is like a helper chip, located on the network card, which takes care of processing the incoming and outgoing TCP/IP packets, passing on "unpacked" data to the processor.

The reason TOE technology was developed was to relieve CPUs – both in servers and storage controllers – of unwanted TCP/IP processing overhead. This overhead could mean performance bottlenecks for the networked storage as well as insufficient processing...