Byte and Switch: But you develop technologies that potentially compete with some of your OEMs. For example, Emulex has had its own iSCSI initiative in the works for some time [via its acquisition of Giganet]. Isn't that competitive with what you're offering?
Wall: In this environment, there's "coopetition" all over the place. Yeah, Emulex has their own iSCSI agenda, and quite frankly that could be perceived to be competitive with LAD [Intel's LAN Access Division], although they're actually using our XScale technology to implement that moving forward. Their technology has to enable their current users of their Fibre Channel technology to make the transition seamlessly, so their approach to how they tackle the marketplace is a little bit different from LAD, which is trying to embed iSCSI technology at the NIC [network interface card] level. So I won't argue with the point that there is at times competition between us and our customers, but we can give you probably hundreds of examples of that.
Byte and Switch: What's going on with Intel's TCP offload engine ASIC? [See Intel Wiggles Its TOE.]
Wall: Like anyone else in this industry, we're going to have 1-Gig and 10-Gig offerings. Within Intel, there are products being developed to accelerate the offload. I can't really talk about specific unannounced products, but rest assured we will have these technologies and we will have the building blocks necessary to maintain a leadership position. There may be different ways of tackling these opportunities based on a different set of product requirements, so we work closely with LAD, and we also work closely with companies like Emulex, LSI, and Adaptec so they can provide leading-edge offload technology and get their customers where they need to get their customers.
A lot of it depends on what type of transition their customers need to make. 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, then 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. On the other end of the spectrum, there are those that have never done any storage networking iSCSI's a new thing. They don't have any legacy to worry about. So you can tackle that in a different way. There are different alternatives that are being implemented and supported by Intel.
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