With the advent of native support for TCP offload in Windows introduced by Microsoft's SNP [Scalable Networking Pack] comes a new driver architecture for Alacritech TCP offload hardware. From this point on, all Alacritech Accelerator drivers can now be classified as either SNP drivers or ATCP drivers.

Windows Server 2003 x86 supports both SNP and ATCP drivers. For Windows Server 2003 x86, unless specific features provided by the ATCP drives are required, SNP aware drivers are prefered.

SNP Aware Drivers

SNP aware drivers are those that are designed to work in conjunction with Microsoft's Scalable Networking Pack. These drivers will only work on systems that support SNP, and only if SNP is installed.

SNP aware drivers will have a major number of 9 or higher (9.x.x.x).

ATCP Drivers (Also known as Non-SNP Aware Drivers)

ATCP drivers are those that use Alacritech's original parallel stack architecture as embodied by the atcp.sys driver file. These drivers are either legacy drivers that were released prior to the existance of SNP, or drivers destined for Windows versions that don't support SNP.