TOE Vendors Flock to Microsoft

There's a scramble going on among TCP/IP offload engine (TOE) vendors to secure the seat closest to Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT). Earlier this week, both Adaptec Inc. (Nasdaq: ADPT) and Broadcom Corp. (Nasdaq: BRCM) announced that they're working closely with the computer giant on their yet unshipped TOE technologies (see Adaptec Demos TCP/IP Offload Card and Broadcom to Deliver TCP/IP Offload).

The announcements come just two weeks after Alacritech Inc. announced that a Microsoft-sponsored test had shown that its TOE cards boosted the performance of the new Windows Server 2003 platform (see Win2003 Zooms on Alacritech).

Adaptec and Broadcom, however, are not yet boasting of any superior benchmark numbers. Neither product is even in beta testing, so the two companies are contenting themselves with announcing that their technologies easily integrate with the new Microsoft Chimney Offload Architecture.

"Our focus is on moving the standard implementation forward," says Adaptec spokesman Andrew McCarthy. "That's what gets potential OEMs and partners excited."

Some industry observers, however, question how excited people are going to get when they hear about the partnerships, since everyone else is doing the same thing. "Microsoft is going to qualify anyone that comes to the table," says Nancy Marrone, an analyst with Enterprise Storage Group Inc. "They have no intention of pushing a particular product... They've got more than 60 partners working on this right now... It's a given that all these TOE guys have to try to qualify."Adaptec, which originally expected to start shipping its TCP/IP offload engine last spring, said on Wednesday that it demonstrated the technology with the new Microsoft TCP/IP offload architecture at WinHEC 2003, Microsoft's hardware developers conference. Adaptec said it is part of Microsoft's development of a standard TOE implementation, which, it said, will be both low cost and easy to implement. The company didn't indicate when it might get the TOE out the door but said it expects to enter the beta process soon.

Broadcom, meanwhile, announced its first TOE chip, which it says it has been working on for several years now. The chip company also emphasized the compliance of its technology with Microsoft's new TCP/IP offload architecture, claiming that products that comply with the architecture will be both cheaper and much less complicated to implement.

TCP/IP offload engine chips handle TCP, IP, and Ethernet processing, thus offloading the processor. This helps boost overall system performance and reduces bottlenecks.

But while all TOE chips can help speed up the processing, the lack of standards have until now burdened companies with undue costs and complexities, says Broadcom product line manager Allen Light. The development of TCP/IP offload engines limited to a single application like iSCSI has led to situations where IT administrators have to deal with two or more independent and different TCP/IP implementations running on a single server. This is both complex and expensive, he says. "It's a real nightmare for the IT administrator." [Ed. note: It can lead to TOE jams?]

Microsoft's Chimney Offload Architecture, according to Light, deals with this problem by segmenting TCP/IP processing tasks between TOE engines and the operating system networking stack. This allows all the traffic to be accelerated through a single adapter, he says. Other vendors, such as Alacritech, provide their own host-based processing software that works with their TOEs.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."Marrone concedes that price and simple integration is important, but insists that performance is paramount. "Why else would you want one?" she asks. "Performance is absolutely why you'd want to do this."

Eugénie Larson, Reporter, Byte and Switch