Alacritech 1000x1 Copper Single-Port Server and Storage Accelerator
We really liked Alacritech's 1000x1 card. A key benefit: It functions as a standard NIC, and that gives this card an edge for repurposing. Should you decide not to use it for iSCSI, it's suitable anywhere you would use a standard NIC, providing CPU relief for almost any TCP task.
The card comes in a low-profile configuration with a spare bracket for both low-profile slots and normal PCI slots. Like all the cards in we tested for this article, it's a standard PCI 64-bit 66-MHz card. Installation was as easy as inserting the card, booting and installing the drivers.
Sadly, getting iSCSI to run was not so easy, but it wasn't Alacritech's fault. The company does not provide an iSCSI driver with its card, so we did our testing with the beta Microsoft iSCSI driver, which lacks a GUI. The command-line experience was truly miserable (we do expect Microsoft to have a full GUI interface for this driver next month).
Throughput performance for the Alacritech card was very good. CPU utilization under iSCSI was not as impressive. Compared with the baseline Broadcom Ethernet NIC embedded in the Dell 2650 we used for testing, the Alacritech's CPU utilization was awesome. However, CPU utilization was consistently high, sometimes almost double, compared with the Adaptec and Intel iSCSI HBAs. While still leaps and bounds better than the embedded Broadcom NIC, the Alacritech simply couldn't compete with the added iSCSI-specific off-load capabilities that the Intel Pro/1000 T and the Adaptec 7211C brought to the table.
Higher CPU utilization performance and a significantly higher price cost the Alacritech 1000x1 the crown, but we wouldn't hesitate to recommend this adapter if you're worried about investment protection--you can always repurpose the card for use in non-iSCSI applications.
Bob Friday, Chief AI Officer for Juniper Networks, explains how the advanced technology is transforming operations.
Contact center leaders from 8x8, Awaken Intelligence, and 360insight discuss the importance of agent experience.
AI may force enterprises to rewire parts of their data centers so they are fully optimized to run such workloads. The question is do you use Ethernet or InfiniBand?
