A TCP offload engine (TOE) card is a networking device that implements TCP/IP protocols on a hardware card. The TOE interface also gives Data ONTAP an interface to either the 1- or the 10-GbE infrastructure. The 10-GbE PCIe TOE card fully supports NFS, CIFS, and iSCSI TCP applications in Data ONTAP.
The TOE card offloads CPU cycles from its host computer, and enables a storage device to have extra CPU cycles for other critical tasks. All user commands are transparent for these TCP applications, and users should not see any difference except an increase in throughput and decrease in CPU utilization.
You can configure TOE card interfaces with both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. The IPv4 traffic using the TOE interfaces is offloaded. However, the IPv6 connections over TOE cards are not offloaded.