In conjunction with Microsoft, Intel recently announced that it surpassed one million I/Os per second (IOPS) in an iSCSI performance test. See the Webcast link near the bottom of this post if you want detailed information on the tests and configurations, but basically the test configuration included a standard server with one Intel 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) server adapter (model X520-2), a quad-core Xeon 5500-series CPU, Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft’s iSCSI initiator software, and Hyper-V. Other test elements included Cisco’s 10GbE Nexus 5020 switch connected to ten iSCSI soft targets.
Specifically, Intel and Microsoft clocked 1,030,000 IOPS (with 512-byte blocks), and more than 2,250MBps with large block sizes (16KB to 256KB) using the Iometer benchmark
