HP BL460c Technologies in HP ProLiant G5 c-Class Server Blades - Page 12

• iSCSI boot for Linux® makes it possible to boot the server from a storage area network (SAN) and eliminates the need for disk drives in a server. • HP Virtual Connect (VC) and Flex 10 provide up to 16 FlexNICs across 4 ports to simplify server connection setup and administration. For complete specifications about HP network adapter products, go to www.hp.com/go/ProLiantNICs. TCP/IP Offload Engine The increased bandwidth of Gigabit Ethernet networks increases demand for CPU cycles to manage the network protocol stack. This means that performance of even a fast CPU will degrade while simultaneously processing application instructions and transferring data to or from the network. Computers most susceptible to this problem are application servers, web servers, and file servers that have many of concurrent connections. The ProLiant TCP/IP Offload Engine for Windows speeds up network-intensive applications by offloading TCP/IP-related tasks from the processors onto the network adapter. TOE network adapters have on-board logic to process common and repetitive tasks of TCP/IP network traffic. This effectively eliminates the need for the CPU to segment and reassemble network data packets. Eliminating this work significantly increases the application performance of servers attached to gigabit Ethernet networks. TOE is included on integrated Multifunction Gigabit Ethernet adapters and optional multifunction mezzanine cards. It is supported on Microsoft Windows Server 2003 when the Scalable Networking Pack is installed. With the delivery of Windows Server 2008, the TCP/IP Offload Chimney that shipped in the Scalable Networking Pack is included as part of the latest Windows operating system. Receive-side Scaling (RSS) RSS balances incoming short-lived traffic across multiple processors while preserving ordered packet delivery. Additionally, RSS dynamically adjusts incoming traffic as the system load varies. As a result, any application with heavy network traffic running on a multi-processor server will benefit. RSS is independent of the number of connections, so it scales well. This makes RSS particularly valuable to web servers and file servers handling heavy loads of short-lived traffic. For RSS support on servers running Windows Server 2003, Scalable Networking Pack must be installed. Windows Server 2008 supports RSS as part of the operating system. iSCSI Acceleration Accelerated iSCSI offloads the iSCSI function to the NIC rather than taxing the server CPU. Accelerated iSCSI is enabled by the HP ProLiant Essentials Accelerated iSCSI Pack that is used with certain embedded Multifunction NICs in Windows and Linux® environments. iSCSI boot for Linux iSCSI boot for Linux is available on BladeSystem NC370i, NC373i, and NC737m Gigabit Ethernet adapters. iSCSI boot allows the host server to boot from a remote OS image located on a SAN within a Red Hat or SUSE Linux environment. The host server uses an iSCSI firmware image (iSCSI boot option ROM), making the remote disk drive appear to be a local, bootable C: drive. Administrators can configure the server to connect to and boot from the iSCSI target disk on the network. It then downloads the OS image from the iSCSI target disk. The HP iSCSI boot solution also includes scripts to significantly simplify the installation process. Adding an iSCSI HBA card is not required. 12