Mike Wall, GM of Intel's Storage Components Division: Page 5 of 11

Wall: As the industry goes through these transitions from ATA to Serial ATA, from perhaps Fibre Channel to iSCSI, from PCI to PCI Express, and SCSI to Serial Attached SCSI – I just rattled off four from the top of my head – we plan on being at the leading edge of a lot of these technology transitions. So our biggest challenge is getting the end users to rapidly adopt these technologies. It's getting the ecosystem and the actual end customers of these products to embrace and adopt these technologies sooner rather than later.

NEXT: Volume, Volume, Volume

Byte and Switch: How much cost do technologies like iSCSI or Serial ATA remove from the equation?

Wall: It's hard to answer that. But the history in the storage industry is similar to the development of mainframes and servers. Whether I'm providing a low-end box or a high-end storage box, I build all my own ASICs [application-specific integrated circuits] from scratch. That's very expensive. There are teams of hardware engineers; you have to fab your own stuff; and you're not getting the volume out of it. That's an extremely expensive way of doing business. That's the way the mainframe business used to work.

Now, Intel in servers – and what I'm telling you is, Intel in storage – is providing I/O processing and Intel Architecture processing to alleviate the need for storage platform providers to have to do their own ASIC development, so they can focus more on the software and firmware features, they can use the building blocks we provide, and therefore they can still maintain a very, very good profit model but they're getting a lot of their basic core hardware technology at less expense – which will be good for the end user.