Quoting from the QLogic official announcement:
QLogic Corp., a leading supplier of iSCSI host bus adapters (HBAs), today announced that its SANblade(r) 4050 Series iSCSI HBAs are the first in the industry to support VMware Infrastructure 3.
QLogic SANblade QLA4050 iSCSI HBAs offer high performance, low CPU utilization, and server connectivity directly to iSCSI storage or to iSCSI storage through an Ethernet network. These 1Gbps iSCSI-to-PCI-X HBA solutions offer several key features and benefits including:
- Offloading iSCSI + TCP/IP Processing
SANblade iSCSI HBAs provide access to a high performance iSCSI SAN without sacrificing server performance. Interrupts, CPU utilization, memory bus utilization and host bus access associated with iSCSI and TCP/IP are significantly reduced by offloading the tasks onto the SANblade iSCSI adapter. With iSCSI offload engines, fewer servers are required to maintain application performance. Server CPU utilization testing with typical applications and current servers demonstrates that QLogic SANblade iSCSI HBAs can save 30 percent or more of the server CPU. This can be a 100 percent improvement over software initiator implementations. Recent testing by Network Computing’s Storage Pipeline magazine shows less than three percent CPU utilization by QLogic iSCSI HBAs for large block tests.- Broad Platform Support
Realizing the cost and ease-of-use benefits of iSCSI HBA standardization requires drivers for multiple operating systems. Drivers for popular operating systems are available for the QLogic iSCSI HBAs including Windows, Solaris, Linux and VMware ESX Server.- Boot from External Storage (SAN)
Managing several operating system “boot images” is a complex and time-consuming task for system administrators. By consolidating operating systems on and booting servers from external storage, changing, adding and removing servers is easier and faster. The SANblade QLA4050 includes “boot-from-SAN” capability, enabling this cost and time saving strategy.