I work at a small company called Small Tree Communications. We are a driver engineering company and we write network drivers for Mac space. We offer networking solutions that you cannot buy anywhere for Macs such as our new 10Gb Intel Cards.

The reason I mention is that we have our own iSCSI Initiator and an AoE Initiator for Mac.

To address 10Gb and AoE specifically, Small Tree's 10Gb cards are not TCP offload engines.

Intel has actually hid away from those because of the tremendous costs (and resultant pricing) that goes along with it. These days with faster memory and cpus, it doesn't really pay off either.

The Intel cards we use have a set of features called I/O AT that provides a number of efficiencies to improve performance including receive side scaling. We have the ability to pull data from the card using multiple CPUS.

I thought this would be more relevant when I explained that we've passed data at near line rate speeds on 10GbE to an AoE device for Mac.

Granted, I'm not familiar to much with the Windows and Linux AoE options. It might be a different story there.