Byte and Switch: How big is your group? Can you quantify it in terms of people or investment?
Wall: I can't talk financials. The storage components division has been around for about six years now. We have on the order of 400 people spread across multiple locations. We do a family of I/O processors that were formerly based on the 960 technology; all the new ones are based on the XScale microarchitecture. We also have a family of PCI bridges and RAID products. That's in our division. But within Intel there is storage technology being developed across five or six divisions. A lot of the business and technology discussions inside of Intel we look at that in a matrix perspective. So in the LAN Access Division, they're doing iSCSI, silicon iSCSI, TCP/IP offload engines. We're doing optical devices. We have the Embedded IA division focused on supplying Pentium processing to external storage array providers. We have the Intel Architecture Labs driving new initiatives and looking at new ways to drive storage applications, whether it's object-based storage or whatever in the future.
Byte and Switch: What technologies specifically are you focusing on now? I know iSCSI has seen its share of hype and heartbreak.
Wall: There's no mystery that iSCSI is a great opportunity. But I wouldn't be the first one to tell you that we're not as far along today as we hoped we would be when we looked at this several years ago. That said, we are still extremely bullish on iSCSI, and we think that iSCSI along with a technology like Serial ATA are providing certain transitions to the marketplace to facilitate that growth of storage platforms in the marketplace. [Ed. note: At least he didn't say "paradigm shift."]
A few developments lately have laid the foundation for the adoption of iSCSI. We finalized the iSCSI standard, thereby eliminating any doubts about the stability of the standard, and second, Microsoft Corp. [Nasdaq: MSFT] announced support for iSCSI. Those two things were clouds that hung over the iSCSI initiative and now it makes it more possible to develop iSCSI devices with a greater deal of confidence. [See iSCSI Gets Go-Ahead and Microsoft to Unleash iSCSI.]
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