XScale is Intel's family of low-power processors for speeding up I/O transactions and is designed to be embedded into storage and networking devices.
Wall also indicated that Emulex would bring features found in its Fibre Channel HBAs to the iSCSI world to meet the needs of storage and server OEMs. "Some of these customers are more at the high end, and they're used to a Fibre Channel environment and a very feature-rich environment. They need to bring all the robustness and richness of the Fibre Channel feature set into iSCSI. So there's a certain way of designing and developing those products to enable that to happen."
An industry source familiar with both companies notes that Emulex is already reselling a version of Intel's first-generation iSCSI adapters. "Their Giganet acquisition never produced a product, so Emulex today remarkets an iSCSI HBA from Intel using standard network plus general-purpose processors," he says.
The new iSCSI HBA that Emulex and Intel are working up, our source speculates, will be based on the iSCSI offload chip technology that Intel licensed from Lucent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: LU). This offload engine processes protocols in hardware instead of firmware, thus greatly improving performance (see Intel Wiggles Its TOE and Intel Licenses Lucent Controller).
Intel and Emulex representatives declined to comment on the details of their April 15 announcement.
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