Hardware-Assisted TCP/IP
TCP on the NIC
iSCSI in the host
Host
TCP in ASIC or CPU/firmware
TCP Offload Engine (TOE)
frees server CPU cycles for
application processing
NIC with TOE
Moving TCP processing functions into silicon improves performance:
Initial implementations will use TOEs to shift a subset of TCP processing
functions into firmware on the adapter.
Alacritech were one of the first vendors to offer TOEs. Several other vendors
now offer TOEs as well.