Sriram Chelluri
Xilinx

Fibre Channel is a well-known high performance protocol used in critical latency- sensitive applications like databases, video streaming, and tape backup. The most common data rate for Fibre Channel is 2 Gbps, with 4 Gbps slowly making headway into data centers, as the per-port cost factors for both are nearly the same. However, FC has not become a prevalent part of IT infrastructures because of its lack of interoperability between vendors and its high connectivity costs, requiring special host bus adaptors (HBAs).

To address the interoperability issues and costs associated with FC, IETF adopted a protocol to transport SCSI data over TCP, more commonly known as iSCSI. This article will review current iSCSI implementations and Ipsil Corporation's 10 Gbps TCP Offload Engine (TOE) solution to address this rapidly growing market.