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!
Steve,
funny thing is, nVidia already includes very remedial TOE capabilities on its shipping chipsets for both Intel and AMD platforms. It can be managed through a webbrowser and, in most cases, is somewhat effectual. will better TOEs be integrated? of course they will as the cost of the technology (for integration and design) comes down.
cheers,
dave
Steve,
funny thing is, nVidia already includes very remedial TOE capabilities on its shipping chipsets for both Intel and AMD platforms. It can be managed through a webbrowser and, in most cases, is somewhat effectual. will better TOEs be integrated? of course they will as the cost of the technology (for integration and design) comes down.
cheers,
dave
Interesting post. I have made a twitter post about this. Hope others find it as interesting as I did.
Interesting post. I have made a twitter post about this. Hope others find it as interesting as I did.