Performance and cheap storage

[Greg A. Woods]

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

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