The idea, says Wall, is to apply the company's model of high-volume silicon production to storage. Storage platform vendors historically have developed their own proprietary components from scratch. "That's an extremely expensive way of doing business," he says. Instead, Intel proposes that storage companies use its standard, commodity building blocks, thereby lowering the overall cost of systems and allowing them to focus on high-level features.
Since joining Intel in 1992, Wall has held several positions, including senior director for SCD's Server/Storage Operation, general manager of its supercomputer systems business unit, and marketing director for Intel's Enterprise Server Group. Prior to joining Intel, Wall was a general manager at supercomputing company Cray Inc. (Nasdaq: CRAY), and also held various marketing management positions at IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM).
Wall recently spoke with Byte and Switch US Editor Todd Spangler about the promise of iSCSI, the challenges of bringing storage networking to the masses, and the continued growth of Fibre Channel. Click on the links below to read the full interview:
Byte and Switch: Can you give us an overview of Intel's storage components business?
Wall: For the past two years, we at Intel have taken the storage industry a lot more seriously than we have in the past. Computing is a three-legged stool of computing, communications, and storage. So storage provides a great opportunity for Intel. We believe that this opportunity is really in its infancy in terms of the volume-shipped perspective... And we want to participate in that by providing silicon building blocks so [storage systems] can get to market more quickly and less expensively. That's an area that ties very well into Intel's core competencies of silicon development and manufacturing.
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