After months of delays, Adaptec Inc. (Nasdaq: ADPT) has finally released its Gigabit Ethernet network accelerator card -- which it's calling a "NAC" -- designed to offload TCP/IP processing from server's host processors for network-intensive applications (see Adaptec Accelerates).
The company originally intended to launch the NAC in the spring of 2002, but it couldn't get the knack [ed. note: sorry] of spinning the silicon (see Adaptec Takes Whack at NAC). Production issues with its TCP Offload Engine (TOE) chip pushed out the delivery date to last fall, which then slipped into this summer. The company started shipping its iSCSI adapter, which uses the same TOE chip, in April (see Adaptec Shipping iSCSI).
Now, as late as it may be, Adaptec's NAC is here -- and the company says it's ready to burn rubber. It claims the Network Accelerator 7711 provides throughput up to 250 MByte/s, depending on the application, and is well suited for speeding up file transfers, database clusters, and backup and restore operations.
"The difference between a NIC [network interface card] and a NAC is that NICs don't scale," says Vijay Ramaswamy, group manager of product marketing in the storage networking group. "Two NACs give you a 100 percent increase in performance."
However, the Adaptec NAC currently works only with the Red Hat Linux operating systems -- users with other OS platforms are out of luck with this NAC. Adaptec won't say exactly when it will have Windows support for the NAC, but expects it will be sometime in 2004.
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