Server NIC Candidates Vie for Your Vote - Hardware Review - Evaluation

ENT, Oct 11, 2000 by Stephen Swoyer

It's presidential election time again, so we've decided to hold an election of our own: An enterprise hardware face-off.

No illegal fund raisers, no subliminal ad campaigns: In our competition we put up server-oriented network interface cards (NIC) from several vendors against one another. The candidates profiled below approach server NIC design from at least two different philosophical view-points: Entries from 3Com Corp. and Intel Corp. key more on the security- and management-related pieces of the puzzle, while veteran Adaptec Corp. and newcomer Alacritech Inc. aim for all-out performance.

3Com 3CR990

The 3CR990 is a 32-bit NIC that includes 3Com's new 3XP processor. The company claims it can help offload much of the TCP/IP processing load -- including TCP/IP checksum and TCP/IP segmentation processing -- from a server. The 3CR990 ships with numerous features, including a dedicated application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) that effectively offloads IPSec processing from a server on to the network card itself.

The 3CR990 features several manageability enhancements, including support for Intel's Wired-for-Management (WFM) initiative, which -- among other functions -- allows sleep power modes and enables Wake-on-LAN (WOL). WOL provides a facility for "waking-up" a computer during nonbusiness hours from a central location to provide software updates or other services.

The 3CR990 server NICs also provide integrated traffic prioritization and class-of-service features that 3Com says can facilitate the prioritizing of time-sensitive packets to improve the performance of key applications and services. 3Com's flagship NICs feature so-called "self-healing" drivers that monitor network connections for potential errors, and support bidirectional load balancing, Hot Plug PCI, and multiple VLANs. We've standardized on the 3CR990 as a client NIC here in our lab environment, and we've been impressed with its features and performance to date.

For the record, we configured the 3Com 3CR990 on a Pentium III 900-MHz system with 512 MB of RAM running Windows 2000 Advanced Server and featuring two 36-GB Ultral 60 SCSI Seagate Cheetah hard drives. For IPSec evaluation, we used one client machine: a Pentium II 450-MHz system with 128 MB of RAM running Windows 2000 Professional.

With Windows 2000 and its native support for IPSec, we've been able to determine the extent to which dedicated IPSec processing silicon can augment overall server performance. When performed in software -- by the operating system itself -- IPSec's triple data encryption standard (3 DES) algorithms can effectively overwhelm a host system's CPU and can max-out overall processor utilization.

In this regard, 3Com's 3CR990 demonstrated the efficiency of dedicated IPSec-processing silicon, and generated an average of about 12 percent processor utilization -- with a high of 28 percent -- in the Windows 2000 performance monitor while performing IPSec's required 3DES encryption. In our TCP/IP throughput test -- which used the Qcheck diagnostic tool available from NetIQ Corp. (www.netiq.com) -- the 3CR990 registered an average overall throughput of 86 Mbps.

Intel PRO/100

The Intel PRO/100 is a 32-bit 10/100 server NIC that also provides dedicated on-board processing for IPSec and other networking tasks. Unlike 3Com's 3CR990, Intel's new PRO/100 cards feature an integrated microprocessor -- the 82559C Fast Ethernet controller -- that consolidates an IPSec encryption coprocessor, enhanced manageability logic, and some TCP/IP processing capabilities in a single, dime-sized form factor.

The PRO/100 is an IT manager's dream. It represents an extension of Intel's traditional WFM infrastructure with support for version 2.0 of Alert-on-LAN -- a new technology that provides proactive notification to an IT manager in the event of a problem such as a hard drive failure or system hang. The PRO/100 also supports Remote PC Boot-through, which allows a computer to preboot from a network server; so-called "adaptive technology," which Intel says dynamically runes adapter performance to provide the best possible throughput with the least possible CPU use; and integrated quality of service features, including support for traffic prioritization and for VLANs.

As with our 3CR990 evaluation, we configured the Intel PRO/100 on a Pentium III 900-MHz system with 512 MB of RAM running Windows 2000 Advanced Server and featuring two 36-GB Ultra160 SCSI Seagate Cheetah hard drives. For IPSec evaluation, we used only one client machine -- a Pentium II 450-MHz system with 128 MB of RAM running Windows 2000 Professional.

On the IPSec tests, Intel's PRO/100 proved to be marginally better than the 3Com 3CR990, averaging slightly over 8 percent processor utilization -- with a high of 26 percent--in our 3DES IPSec tests. In our Qcheck TCP/IP throughput test, the PRO/100 again bested the 3 CR990 in terms of its average overall throughput -- 90 Mbps to 86 Mbps.

Adaptec Duo64

Adaptec has been in the forefront of highperformance peripheral development since PCs first began cropping up as file servers within enterprise environments. The company also has been a proponent of 64-bit, 66-MHz extensions to the standard 32-bit, 33-MHz PCI bus, and it has aggressively implemented 64-bit, 66-MHz extensions to the PCI bus across a range of its products. Today, Adaptec is well-known for its SCSI and RAID host bus adapters (ITBA), but the company also markets a 64-bit, 66-MHz server MC solution -- dubbed DuraLAN -- that has been a popular choice in many enterprise environments since its introduction.