Host Architectures
Bus Metrics
PCI Bus (32 bit)
LAN
CPU
NIC
FC HBA
SAN
PCI Bus
SCSI HBA
HBA is the generic name for any host interface card, including a NIC, a SCSI
card and a Fibre Channel card. However, in the SAN world, HBA has become
the common name for the SAN card.
The HBA is often associated with having onboard processing, commonly
referred to as offload capabilities, whereas a NIC typically uses the hosts
processor.
Older, slower, bus architectures typically supported many cards and with the
less demanding interfaces this was never really a problem.
As interface speeds increased, the bus started to become the bottleneck.