Cool! TCP/IP Offload Engine Enablement

MrD

Outsource your packet processing.

One exciting new feature available on Dell’s 9th Generation (9G) PowerEdge servers: a TCP/IP Offload Engine (TOE) for accelerated TCP/IP processing. A TOE helps deliver greater network throughput and efficiency by offloading network functions to dedicated hardware instead of running them through the main CPU.

Unfortunately, on today’s corporate Gigabit Ethernet networks, servers burn tremendous computational power just dealing with the influx and out-flux of network packets.

The solution is the Broadcom NetXtreme II 5708’s TOE, which assumes responsibility for handling TCP/IP operations. The TOE transforms a network adapter into a sub-computer dedicated specifically to handling packet-level transactions.

In the case of Dell’s PowerEdge 9G servers this means the formidable dual-core power of the Intel Xeon, its front-side bus, and main memory will be reserved for applications, not network overhead.

Applications likely to benefit substantially from TOE configurations include file-oriented storage, block-oriented storage, backups, database transactions, and tightly coupled distributed applications such as high performance computing (HPC).

DirtySouth

This may be a silly question, but wouldn't this be like a NIC on steroids?

JDMurray

Yes, it sounds like the NIC has its own processor to off-load traffic processing from the main CPU, just like graphics cards have their own GPUs. With multi-core CPUs becoming the norm, I'm not sure how much this is really needed, even on high-traffic servers. The NIC only processes OSI layers 1 and 2, and everything higher in the packet must be passed up to the TCP/IP stack in the OS anyway.