However, we do expect iSCSI to make headway in small, single-purpose SANs that don't require huge throughput. With that in mind, we hammered on the new crop of iSCSI adapters from Adaptec, Alacritech and Intel. All three entries were capable cards--albeit a little rough around the edges--but Adaptec's iSCSI 7211C took the crown thanks to its strong and consistent performance and competitive price.
In our Green Bay, Wis., Real-World Labs®, we fired up three Dell 2650s with 2.6-GHz Intel Xeon processors and 1 GB of RAM, and loaded each with its own SCSI subsystem for the Microsoft Windows 2000 SP3 base operating system. On the Ethernet side, we used a 12-port Cisco Catalyst 3550, and storage was provided by a Eurologic SANbloc 2 RAID enclosure with 14 73-GB, 10,000 RPM 2-GB Fibre Channel hard disks. Finally we applied the glue that makes all of this stuff talk, a Cisco MDS-9216 Fibre Channel switch with an IP storage blade. For sanity's sake we also had a Nishan 3000 Series storage switch on site--the Cisco hardware was pretty fresh.
Our testing was performed with Iometer version 2003.02.15 (see iometer.sourceforge.net for more details). Tests had five-second ramp-ups and two-minute stable test runs. As a baseline, we tested the embedded Broadcom NIC without any performance enhancement.
Tests:
Database: 2-KB random I/Os with a mix of 67 percent reads and 33 writes, which represents a typical database workload (see results left and right).
Maximum Read Throughput: Transfer request size to 64 KB, percent read/write distribution to 100 percent read, and percent random/ sequential distribution to 100 percent sequential (see results online).
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