Adaptec, which originally expected to start shipping its TCP/IP offload engine last spring, said on Wednesday that it demonstrated the technology with the new Microsoft TCP/IP offload architecture at WinHEC 2003, Microsoft's hardware developers conference. Adaptec said it is part of Microsoft's development of a standard TOE implementation, which, it said, will be both low cost and easy to implement. The company didn't indicate when it might get the TOE out the door but said it expects to enter the beta process soon.
Broadcom, meanwhile, announced its first TOE chip, which it says it has been working on for several years now. The chip company also emphasized the compliance of its technology with Microsoft's new TCP/IP offload architecture, claiming that products that comply with the architecture will be both cheaper and much less complicated to implement.
TCP/IP offload engine chips handle TCP, IP, and Ethernet processing, thus offloading the processor. This helps boost overall system performance and reduces bottlenecks.
But while all TOE chips can help speed up the processing, the lack of standards have until now burdened companies with undue costs and complexities, says Broadcom product line manager Allen Light. The development of TCP/IP offload engines limited to a single application like iSCSI has led to situations where IT administrators have to deal with two or more independent and different TCP/IP implementations running on a single server. This is both complex and expensive, he says. "It's a real nightmare for the IT administrator." [Ed. note: It can lead to TOE jams?]
Microsoft's Chimney Offload Architecture, according to Light, deals with this problem by segmenting TCP/IP processing tasks between TOE engines and the operating system networking stack. This allows all the traffic to be accelerated through a single adapter, he says. Other vendors, such as Alacritech, provide their own host-based processing software that works with their TOEs.
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