Qlogic FastLinQ 3400 Series, User Manual

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1–Product Overview
Features
4 83840-546-00 E
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PCI power management interface (v1.1)
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64-bit base address register (BAR) support
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EM64T processor support
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iSCSI and FCoE boot support
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Virtualization

Microsoft
®

VMware

Linux
®

XenServer
®

Single root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV)
iSCSI
The Internet engineering task force (IETF) has standardized iSCSI. SCSI is a
popular protocol that enables systems to communicate with storage devices,
using block-level transfer (address data stored on a storage device that is not a
whole file). iSCSI maps the SCSI request/response application protocols and its
standardized command set over TCP/IP networks.
As iSCSI uses TCP as its sole transport protocol, it greatly benefits from hardware
acceleration of the TCP processing. However, iSCSI as a layer 5 protocol has
additional mechanisms beyond the TCP layer. iSCSI processing can also be
offloaded, thereby reducing CPU use even further.
The QLogic 8400/3400 Series adapters target best-system performance,
maintains system flexibility to changes, and supports current and future OS
convergence and integration. Therefore, the adapter's iSCSI offload architecture
is unique because of the split between hardware and host processing.