Intel & Emulex: iSCSI Tag Team?

Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC) and Emulex Corp. (NYSE: ELX) are teaming up on a joint development project, which would appear to involve Emulex licensing some Intel components and bringing a high-performance iSCSI adapter to market.

The two companies yesterday said they plan to announce details of a joint development agreement on April 15 at the Storage Networking World conference in Phoenix.

Emulex, one of the leading makers of Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs) for SANs, has lately been quiet about its iSCSI strategy. It acquired Giganet in December 2000 in a stock deal then valued at $645 million, which was supposed to launch Emulex into the IP storage networking world. But as the iSCSI market stagnated, the Giganet technology has seen little or no traction to date.

So what's the new Intel/Emulex partnership all about? In an interview with Byte and Switch this week, Mike Wall, general manager of Intel's Storage Components Group, gave us a hint.

"Emulex has their own iSCSI agenda... although they're actually using our XScale technology to implement that moving forward," he said. "Their technology has to enable their current users of their Fibre Channel technology to make the transition seamlessly." (For the full interview, see Mike Wall, GM of Intel's Storage Components Division.)XScale is Intel's family of low-power processors for speeding up I/O transactions and is designed to be embedded into storage and networking devices.

Wall also indicated that Emulex would bring features found in its Fibre Channel HBAs to the iSCSI world to meet the needs of storage and server OEMs. "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. 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."

An industry source familiar with both companies notes that Emulex is already reselling a version of Intel's first-generation iSCSI adapters. "Their Giganet acquisition never produced a product, so Emulex today remarkets an iSCSI HBA from Intel using standard network plus general-purpose processors," he says.

The new iSCSI HBA that Emulex and Intel are working up, our source speculates, will be based on the iSCSI offload chip technology that Intel licensed from Lucent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: LU). This offload engine processes protocols in hardware instead of firmware, thus greatly improving performance (see Intel Wiggles Its TOE and Intel Licenses Lucent Controller).

Intel and Emulex representatives declined to comment on the details of their April 15 announcement.A number of companies are developing products that are designed to accelerate IP storage networking traffic. So far, this sector has been largely limited to bragging about lab demos, as the wider market for iSCSI-based storage systems has been slow to take off (see Trebia Taps Stroh as CEO, Silverback Makes iSCSI Howl, Vendors Chip Into IP Storage, and Compaq, Alacritech: We Kick NAS).

Todd Spangler, US Editor, Byte and Switch