Is there a difference between an iSCSI HBA and an iSCSI NIC?
The iSCSI adapter vendors are all in a toot about what to call these things. Companies from the IP space like Alacritech or Intel are content to call them iSCSI NICs. Companies from the Fibre Channel space like QLogic want to call them iSCSI HBAs. The acronym “NIC” seems to have a commodity connotation, whereas “HBA” implies some additional value. On the other hand, the “NIC” advocates point out that their products also can be used concurrently as a wire-speed GE NIC for NAS or client-server connections. That may prove to be an important capability – especially for blade servers, where card slots are scarce. For efficiency, all iSCSI adapters need to have TCP off-load and potentially some degree of iSCSI processing off-load as well.
