Beth Pariseau over at SearchStorage.com has another great interview, this time with “Mr. SCSI”, Larry Boucher of Alacritech. Despite being early to market with TCP offload engine (TOE) Ethernet NICs, and iSCSI HBAs in particular, the company has been less successful than many would have expected. This is probably because most folks just didn’t use ‘em - iSCSI works fine with a plain-Jane gigabit NIC on today’s modern computers.

Boucher suspects (as do I) that 10 Gb speed will make TOEs much more critical, and he expects Alacritech to be well positioned to take advantage of this shift.  He sees TOE becoming integrated with future PC chipsets, and not just for storage.  Asked when he expects “the year of 10 gigabit” to come, Boucher estimated 2009.  Sounds reasonable to me!

Well, not exactly Klingon, but both Host Bus Adapter powerhouses chose today to announce 8 Gb/s Fibre Channel HBAs. This would be somewhat more exciting if there was any device these high-speed adapters could speak to. But switches, arrays, and drives are still a ways off. So for now, Emulex and QLogic can only speak to themselves, since after QLogic’s little stunt of “scooping” Emulex on the announcement today, it’s unlikely they’ll be too interested in speaking to each other!

I guess the egg comes before the chicken after all…