Both Adaptec and Broadcom are making a good move by going after the overall TCP/IP market rather than just addressing the infant iSCSI market, says Gartner Inc. analyst James Opfer. "The market for TCP/IP is bigger than the market for iSCSI," he says. "This is iSCSI as part of the packet, not the whole thing."
Others developing TOE technologies include Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A), Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC), QLogic Corp. (Nasdaq: QLGC), Silverback Systems Inc., and Trebia Networks Inc. (see Trebia Gets Second Wind, Silverback Makes iSCSI Howl).
The question, of course, is how these companies' TOE chips play out in the market. Neither Adaptec and Broadcom would reveal how well they expect their chips to perform, but word has it that the Adaptec TOE, at least, which is the same one it's using in its recently shipped iSCSI adapter, is slower than what Alacritech has already been delivering for some time (see Adaptec Shipping iSCSI).
Performance is absolutely important, says Adaptec's McCarthy, but he adds that delivering a simple and smoothly integrated product at a low price is more important to end users. That's especially true, he feels, in the small business and enterprise markets that Adaptec is targeting.
"You can work really hard to get performance in a nonstandard environment," he says. "But that's something that not many customers will deploy... Everybody in this industry needs to shake off this obsession with performance. Performance rarely wins the day."
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