First Not Foremost

A new round of trade shows starts this week, with Storage Networking World in San Diego. It's an opportunity for hands-on access to suppliers and their roadmaps. It's also a chance to hobnob with peers and freshen connections. (See our latest poll to give us your particular take on this week's confab.)

For many, a trade show like SNW is also a time to confront the dark side of storage networking -- the hype and manipulation that all too often accompany the selling. A key element in this is the race to be "first" out of the gate with a hot technology -- adapter, chip, switch, port speed, virtualized server, whatever.

Case in point: If you've perused our message boards lately, perhaps you've tracked a teapot tempest over 10-Gbit/s chips and adapters. It all erupted over claims by startup NetXen to be the first product of its kind to hit the streets. (See NetXen Singles Out 10-Gig.)

On background, we must come clean. Despite journalistic skepticism, we fell right into the trap. When NetXen claimed to be first, we bit, and right on cue, got bitten by another supplier, Myricom, making the same claim.

Back at the drawing board, it seemed there were indeed some distinctions that required clarification. Myricom was first out of the gate with a programmable PCIe 10-Gbit/s Ethernet chip, which was in deployment by a range of OEMs and resellers. (See Myricom Brings HPC to Ethernet and Myricom, Foundry Push 10-Gig.)But NetXen wasn't backing down. Who was right?

Taking apart the claims bit by bit revealed a tie in the hype department: 10-Gbit/s Ethernet support? Check. PCIe compatible? Check. Single-chip solution? Check. Programmable? Check for both. Customer deployments? Check. Although Myricom's CEO Charles L. "Chuck" Seitz declined to name adopters, he acknowledges that two of the customers who'll be OEMing NetXen's chip -- HP and IBM -- are in general terms Myricom customers, too.

It came down to one distinction -- NetXen appears to be ahead of Myricom in offering dual-port connectivity.

But was that really the differentiator? Hardly. According to Bob Wheeler, senior analyst at the Linley Group consultancy, "These are two very different approaches." Myricom's support of its own Myrinet high-speed interconnect as well as Ethernet in its 10-Gbit/s chips aims for clustered, high-performance computing environments. NetXen is targeting low-cost NICs for high-volume deployment in ordinary data center servers.

What's more, no one has publicly acknowledged using either vendor's latest wares in their gear.Lessons learned? This argument turned out to be irrelevant. The hype machine grinds on, with little concern for the reality of what's happening in the data center.

Don't get us wrong. We're all for innovation. It's a key factor in choosing the Byte and Switch Top Ten Private Companies list. (See Top Ten Private Companies: Spring 2006.) But there's a difference between innovation and presale arguments for being first. The key is customer adoption over time.

Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch

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