I have an Equallogic iSCSI SAN attached to a HP DL360 G5 Server via MS iSCSI
initiator 2.06 and a Foundry FLS624 switch dedicated to the iSCSI traffic.
When I copy data to/from the iSCSI attached SAN to the local C:\ drive on the
server it performs very well.

When I share the iSCSI attached SAN then do the same read/write test from a
XP workstation on a GB network, I get great performance when writing to the
share however when reading from the server is really slow. Looking at the
network performance under task manager, I see 54% when writing and only 20%
when reading.

Test Server = HP DL360 G5

Test workstation is a Dell Precision 390 attached to the same Foundry FLS
624 switch.

Tested NIC Cards NC373i NC380t NC360T Intel server 1000pro pt quad port.

Tested Windows Server 2003 SP1 SP2 R2 and Server 2008

iSCSI Initiator 2.4 - 2.6

My test is a single 2gb file.

All windows Scalable Networking is disabled via the recently released
Windows Update as well as all of the related NIC settings.

Netsh int ip set chimney DISABLED

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Servic es\Tcpip\Parameters
EnableRSS == 0
EnableTCPA == 0
Enabletcpchimney == 0

I have escalated this issue to engineering in HP support. They are able to
duplicate the problem easily however they are sure that the problem resides
in Windows Server 2003. When we install Server 2008 trial the problem goes
away which eliminates the hardware.

I’m hoping that since the problem is so easy to duplicate that others have
seen it and there is a fix out there somewhere.

Thanks

Steve