Adaptec iSCSI Card 7211C review

Unusually for Adaptec, it made something of a false start with its iSCSI HBAs (host bus adaptors). The company's first release last year was lacking in decent management facilities and was consequently difficult to configure. Thankfully, this oversight has been dealt with in this latest version. Although the cumbersome command-line configuration utility hasn't been ditched, it's now partnered by a more useful and accessible Control Panel applet, which offers much better access to the card's settings. This has been augmented further as the new cards also have a decent BIOS configuration menu, allowing them to support server bootup directly from an iSCSI storage target.

Installation of the card is simple enough. You can either access the BIOS menu to add iSCSI initiator and target details or wait until the system has loaded into Windows. Once the driver is installed you can access the Control Panel applet, which fires up a quick-start wizard that asks for details on the initiator name, IP address and target details. Options include whether to log back on after a reboot and specifying the target as bootable.

For performance testing we used the open-source Iometer and ran the same tests as those conducted on the REO RA2000 iSCSI backup accelerator. On a dual 1.7GHz Xeon server we saw throughput for a single drive settle at 33MB/sec, which was virtually the same as that returned by Microsoft's software initiator. With the same four iSCSI targets configured as a RAID-0 array and four disk workers running, Iometer reported 67MB/sec - once again, very close to Microsoft's results. However, the biggest impact the Adaptec cards had was on local server processor overheads.

For the single-disk and four-disk striped array tests, Iometer showed CPU utilisation as 18 per cent and 19 per cent respectively with Microsoft at the helm. But with Adaptec in charge these figures dropped to only 3.1 and 3.5 per cent. The biggest improvement was with a Pentium III/ 866MHz system running Windows 2000 Server, which saw an overall reduction in CPU overheads of no less than 25 per cent.

Author: Dave Mitchell