To T.O.E. or Tie, that is the question!

T.O.E. also known as TCP Offload Engine. TIE (no, not Tie fighter), to bind.

What is a TOE card? Well, it is more often than not found in iSCSI SANs, but it's function is simple. A TOE card is a network interface card with a ASIC that handles the network overhead in place of the CPU. That is to say, it handles the processing of getting data on and off the computer rather then relying on the main CPU to. The advantage is that network speeds increase while overall CPU utilization drops (slightly) because it no longer has to handle the I/O needs of the NIC (Network Interface Card). So what does all this mean? Well, spend a few hundred bucks on a 10/100/1000 TOE card and see at least a 15% in network speeds. And that's without any other network or server upgrades. Now, it doesn't seem like it would make a whole hill of beans worth of difference, but it does. As CPU speeds increase, servers are better able to handle the network I/O without affecting overall server and network performance. Ever notice how the server bogs down with high utilization? A TOE card can help with this.

So what about "tie". Well, that's kind of a misnomer. What I should have said was "bind", or "link aggregation", or maybe even "concactenating NICs". What's it all mean? What I mean is to link multiple NICs into one virtual NIC to increase throughput.

What's the difference? A lot.