This card thrived under load. Its best performance came when we pushed it to the max, lending some credibility to the extreme line-speed performance capabilities the company reported using highly optimized configurations. For all its grace under pressure, however, the SES1001T lagged a little behind the others when performing simple read operations. Plus there's the matter of increased CPU usage. The accelerator's only other downside was its lack of Unix/Linux support.
Regardless, Alacritech's single-ASIC design, based on its patented SLIC (session-layer interface control) Data Offload Architecture, is extremely powerful. The card leaves plenty of room for growth because the microcode for its 1000x1 ASIC can be reprogrammed through a driver upgrade.
SES1001T iSCSI Accelerator, $559. Alacritech, (877) 338-7542, (408) 287-9997. www.alacritech.com
The QLA4010C is a full-height, short form-factor PCI-X card with 32 MB of DRAM and a QLogic ASIC. It's the only HBA we tested that runs at 133-MHz, rather than the standard 66 MHz.
This card installed like a dream. QLogic's GUI is well-designed and as easy to use as the Microsoft initiator. In fact, the QLogic interface for managing the initiator and targets seemed to bypass the problem of losing dynamic disks.
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