Oct 08, 2006
Networking Tidbit
I can't for the life of me find the reference but (apparently) in terms of the new generation of high speed network interfaces (Gigabit and 10 Gigabit NIC's) - a rule of thumb is that 1Mb of networking speed requires 1MHz of CPU speed to process). For example putting a 100Mb NIC into a 100MHz PC will overwhelm the processor.
So if you're thinking in terms of plonking high-speed NIC's into older hardware be aware of that the CPU is likely to be the bottleneck rather than the NIC.
This is why TOE's are becoming popular. A TOE is a TCP Offload Engine - it handles the network overhead while the CPU can get on with doing whatever it was doing. Its becoming more important as people start to see the potential in iSCSI as a storage transport mechanism.
[/tech/network] | [permalink] | [2006.10.08-23:52.00]