Can iReady Hit Its Targets?

Startup iReady Corp., still trying to make its mark in the iSCSI field, next week will unveil a target software suite that the company says allows OEMs to bring their Fibre-Channel-to-iSCSI adapters to market sooner.

The iReady Target can be used as a standalone suite, but also serves as a complement to the ethernetMAX iSCSI controller and host bus adapter (HBA) product line iReady launched in May (see iReady Intros iSCSI Lineup). The company announced OEM agreements with Bridgeworks, Elipsan Ltd., and Raidtec Corp., which plans to sell its target software with iReady adapters.

We’re bringing targets into play,” says iReady CEO Ryo Koyama. “A lot of big server guys have been saying, ‘Where are your targets?’ ”

As a standalone solution, iReady Target runs with existing hardware -- offering a potentially big time-to-market advantage, analysts say. “Their software suite is basically code that allows another company to use that code and accelerate their time to market,” says Randy Kerns of Evaluator Group. “The other company doesn’t have to develop it themselves.”

Gary Thomas, president of iReady, describes his company’s controller, HBAs, and target software as an “almost plug-and-play” iSCSI solution. Together, they combine iSCSI acceleration, full TCP/IP offload, full line-rate IPSec encryption, and Gigabit Ethernet media access control (MAC) and physical (PHY) layers. The software is based on Red Hat Inc. (Nasdaq: RHAT) Linux 8.0 but the company says it's portable to any platform and its instruction set is designed to support Intel x86 and PowerPC CPUs.Bridgeworks will use the iReady components as part of a low-cost bridge (what else?) solution that allows customers to upgrade to iSCSI; Elipsan will employ iReady’s bundle as part of its storage appliance manager; and Raidtec will integrate iReady hardware and software into its SNAZ file server appliances to provide its customers with easy IP SAN connectivity.

Koyama says the company expects to announce more storage OEM partners in the first quarter of 2004.

And Evaluator Group's Kerns foresees significant interest in the target suite. “I expect they’ll pick up quite a few more [OEMs] between now and the middle of next year,” he says. “This is the quickest path to get there for anybody who wants to get into that market and doesn’t have the code. The iSCSI market is the small-to-midsize storage market. It’s a big market.”

If Kerns is correct, iReady should hit its target of penetrating a crowded field of TCP offload engine (TOE) contenders (see Is iReady?).

— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch