This hasn't been a problem at all, says Stocker: "We didn't see even a bump in CPU utilization -- there's no I/O impact. When you're dealing with file servers, the I/O is all on the disk." It should also be noted that Intel's PRO 1000 T adapter currently employs TCP offload technology from Wind River Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: WIND), which helps on this front (see Intel Gets Juiced With Wind River).
Still, at 1.5 TBytes, this is a relatively small SAN. There's no way to tell whether iSCSI gear could scale up to handle enterprise data center loads today. Also, Safeco FIS is using its iSCSI-based storage network for file access -- which, as Stocker points out, is a disk I/O-intensive operation but not an especially network-intensive one. In an iSCSI environment, a high-bandwidth application would put a lot more stress on the host CPU.
And it's fair to point out that there haven't been very many large-scale iSCSI deployments to date. You could practically count them on one hand (see Nishan Bites Into the Core).
But it appears that iSCSI is working well for Safeco FIS today. Down the road, Stocker plans to connect its existing EMC Corp.
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