Demartek Evaluates iSCSI Performance of Chelsio T6 25 100GbE Unified Wire Adapters

Demartek LLC evaluated the iSCSI performance of the Chelsio Communications, Inc. ‘s Terminator 6 (T6) 100GbE and 25GbE Unified Wire adapters supporting target and initiator offload functionality respectively.

The evaluation showed that for synthetic 4K reads, Chelsio T62100-CR with iSCSI target offload achieved 2.5 million IO/s or three times the IO/s, half the latency, and over 3.5 times the target processor effectiveness compared to 100GbE software iSCSI target. Similarly, for synthetic 4K writes, the T62100-CR with iSCSI target offload achieved 1.4 million IO/s or 43% more IO/s, 30% less latency, and a 185% increase in target processor effectiveness compared to 100GbE software iSCSI target.

Chelsio T62100-CR

For the Demartek MySQL OLTP real-world workload, the T62100-CR with iSCSI target offload took half the time to complete 5.6 million OLTP transactions, and achieved 78% more IO/s, 41% less latency, and 5.5 times the target processor effectiveness compared to 100GbE software iSCSI target.

“As the enterprise storage systems market sees the increasing adoption of 100GbE network and NVMe flash storage technologies, iSCSI adapters with offload target capabilities are needed to enable maximum performance and efficiency for the broad base of iSCSI applications,” said Dennis Martin, president, Demartek. “In our tests, the Chelsio T62100-CR 100GbE adapter with iSCSI target offload outperformed the native iSCSI software target in our synthetic and real-world application tests. In these tests, we measured IO/s, throughput, latency and time to complete the workloads.“

“Our T6 Unified Wire adapters establish a groundbreaking performance bar for Ethernet storage by enabling a 100 Gbps line-rate and extreme IO/s performance for highly efficient iSCSI storage target solutions,” said Kianoosh Naghshineh, CEO, Chelsio. “T6 storage protocol offload tchnology allows 100GbE iSCSI to completely supersede proprietary storage fabrics, while enabling concurrent, future-proof deployment of new Ethernet storage protocols without forcing an infrastructure forklift upgrade. With transition to All-Flash arrays, all storage systems are essentially HPC systems and require offload technology to realize the Flash performance capabilities and value.“

The evaluation is available and in the iSCSI Zone on the company’s web site.

Additional information on Ethernet and iSCSI technology is available on the Storage Interface Comparison page.