Under test, the card's performance was close to that of Adaptec's, but in overall transfer speed, the card finished third. To its advantage, the QLA4010C consistently posted the lowest CPU utilization, even on the occasional test when its transfer speed exceeded the competition. The only other factor that worked against QLogic was cost, with a street price $100 higher than its closest competitor.
Uniquely, the 4010C can boot directly into Windows or Linux from SAN storage. The other vendors have only promised this. This capability lets you run servers without the added cost and support involved in mounting directly attached storage in each machine.
QLA4010C SANblade iSCSI HBA, $679. QLogic, (800) 662-4471, (949) 389-6000. www.qlogic.com
Last year's Editor's Choice, the 7211C must have undergone a few changes, because we ran into some problems this time around.
The 7211C is a full-height, short form-factor 66-MHz PCI-X card with a TOE ASIC, a Storage Protocol Accelerator, an Intel 80200 processor for iSCSI functions and 512 MB of DRAM. Although the new card's circuit board design was identical to that of the earlier 7211C, the main components contained several generational changes.
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