Intel 10GbE Adapter Performance Evaluation for FCoE and iSCSI

Table Of Contents

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Demartek

Intel

10GbE Adapter Performance Evaluation

September 2010

Page 2 of 18

1 – Converged Networks and Adapters

“Converged” or “unified” networks have been garnering considerable attention recently, especially

as the 10-Gb/sec Ethernet and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) standards have been made

official within the last calendar year

. However, the measured fusion of the Ethernet and Fibre

Channel worlds triggers many questions among datacenter directors, managers and administrators.

They seek answers regarding the technology, planning, implementation, configuration,

performance and price, among others.

One of the components of a converged infrastructure is the adapter in the server and the concept

of a single adapter that handles both 10Gb/sec Ethernet and 10Gb/sec Fibre Channel storage

traffic. These adapters take advantage of the updated version of Ethernet known as Data Center

Bridging (DCB) and its ability to carry multiple types of traffic concurrently, in a lossless fashion,

giving each traffic type its own priority-based flow control.

For many, running at 10Gb/sec for Ethernet or Fibre Channel storage is a new breakthrough in

performance. Because of the fusion of Ethernet and Fibre Channel, it is not surprising that vendors

who previously provided only Ethernet adapters and vendors who previously provided only Fibre

Channel adapters are now providing converged adapters that support both Ethernet and Fibre

Channel. Datacenter professionals now have to consider more vendors than they previously

considered for Ethernet NICs and Fibre Channel HBAs, respectively.

This report is a real-world evaluation of the performance of some of these adapters provided by

vendors from “both camps” as it were, the Ethernet adapter vendors and the Fibre Channel adapter

vendors.

Two Approaches

There are two approaches to providing a converged or unified adapter. One approach is to use

proprietary hardware adapters with offloaded FC and FCoE (and in some cases TCP/IP) protocols

embedded in the hardware. This is the traditional way that Fibre Channel adapter vendors provide

their solutions. They include their own drivers, interfaces and management software.

The second approach, which Intel

has chosen, is to take advantage of native FCoE initiators in

operating systems and build the adapter to work in a complementary way with the platform

hardware and operating system to enable FCoE traffic, all at lower cost than competitive adapters.

Intel

believes that native FCoE operating system support will develop similar to the way that iSCSI

support has developed with native initiators in operating systems. With current multi-core Intel

processor-based platforms able to sustain two ports of 10Gb/sec Ethernet in these environments at

well under 10% CPU utilization, there is plenty of headroom for the Intel

approach.

Comparisons and roadmaps for Ethernet, FCoE and other storage interfaces are available at:

http://www.demartek.com/Demartek_Interface_Comparison.html.