StarWind Software

Do you support these?

Which cards?

Thanks,

Chris

Chris,

we do support all the hardware Windows natively supports by itself. If the question is really is "do you have own drivers for some hardware allowing to bypass much of the TCP stack" the answer is "no, we do not and do not have plans to support". I can try to describe why First of all we're orienting ourself to the home users or small offices mostly. Where expensive hardware is a rare beast. Second, cheap hardware rules! In a year or year and a half when GbE is expected to become a mainstream CPU power would double (Moore law is still working), DDR2 with 10GBps in dual channel mode would become really popular and either built-in GbE connected to hub directly (like i875P or nVidia nForce3 250) or PCI-X or PCI Express would become easy to find in next door PC store. This does not live much place to TOE, hardware iSCSI etc etc etc. CPU would take more and more of the work dedicated I/O processor does. And b/s CPU is expected to become more and more powerful dedicated I/O processor would disappear. Like it was with case of parallel SCSI which totally lost the battle to cheap ATA some time ago. So TOE, hardware iSCSI would move to server market where we do not play for now. That's why we do not support "special" hardware by ourself and totally relying on OS support. 30% of CPU usage for 150 MBps for today would becomore 5-8% of CPU usage in year and a half. More then a reasonable numbers, aren't they?

Thanks!

ChrisKinsman wrote:Do you support these?

Which cards?

Thanks,

Chris

StarWind will work with the Alacritech TCP offload cards.

John,

nice to hear this! Thank you for notifing us. We've not tried ourself yet.

JohnM wrote:StarWind will work with the Alacritech TCP offload cards.

JohnM wrote:StarWind will work with the Alacritech TCP offload cards.

You do need to add a registry setting to the system when using the Alacritech card with StarWind. It should be placed in HKLM->SYSTEM->CurrentControlSet->Services->ATCP->Parameters. The DWORD key you need to add is IgnorePushPort3260 with a value of 0. There may be some info on this in the support area at the Alacritech web site.

JohnM wrote:

JohnM wrote:StarWind will work with the Alacritech TCP offload cards.

You do need to add a registry setting to the system when using the Alacritech card with StarWind. It should be placed in HKLM->SYSTEM->CurrentControlSet->Services->ATCP->Parameters. The DWORD key you need to add is IgnorePushPort3260 with a value of 0. There may be some info on this in the support area at the Alacritech web site.

JohnM,

Thank you for the information.
We'll add it into StarWind documentation.

FYI the information is icluded into Alacritech's FAQ:
http://www.alacritech.com/html/iSCSI_FAQ.html