A thread started here on the TechCenter led me to do some investigation into an "iSCSI ready" feature of the onboard Broadcom 5708 NICs on the Dell™ PowerEdge™ R805 server. Turns out that the Broadcom 5708 or NetExtreme II NIC has the capability to be a TCIP/IP offload engine (TOE), which is a fairly well-known thing. It also can be a hardware-based iSCSI adapter with some iSCSI offload capability as well—which is the "iSCSI ready" feature. It is also possible to use this adapter to boot from iSCSI as it is hardware based.

I had a really hard time finding any documentation about how to configure and enable the iSCSI-ready feature, so I put together a really cool wiki page that has few screen shots and some basic guidance. Additionally, I did a quick performance test to see if it did indeed reduce CPU utilization. I found a small reduction with my test workload and posted a screen shot of that as well.

Todd