Sophisticated new applications and more powerful PCs are driving demand for Gigabit-enabled desktops:

• The growth of collaborative work environments
• Routine sharing of large data files
• Converged applications The rapid growth of e-mail and e-Commerce has combined to produce a dramatic increase in data moving across the public Internet and enterprise IP networks. This increase in data traffic is driving the evolution of data storage outside the traditional direct attached storage (DAS) model and into the infrastructure of the network itself. As a result, the industry is seeing the emergence of storage area networks (SANs) and network-attached storage (NAS) as popular alternatives.

Important storage transitions are now underway, enabled by the emergence of complementary networking and I/O technologies. These trends include:

• The transition to Ethernet and iSCSI technology for Internet Protocol (IP) based storage.
• The emergence of Serial ATA (S-ATA) as a disk interconnect
• The adoption of InfiniBand* architecture as clustered system interconnect.
• The creation of a new serial bus architecture, PCI-Express as a general purpose I/O interconnect capable of scaling to 10 Gbps and beyond.

An emerging Ethernet-based technology known as iSCSI (Internet SCSI-Small Computer System Interface) provides a high-speed, low-cost, long-distance storage solution for Web sites, service providers, enterprises, and other organizations. Traditional SCSI commands and data transfers are encapsulated in TCP/IP packets. The iSCSI standard makes it possible to build highly interoperable, low-cost IP-based SANs. Some of the challenges that developers face with iSCSI and other implementations are performance, especially TCP/IP offload, storage management and cost.

To enable the transitions to Ethernet-based IP storage, Intel is delivering high-performance, validated storage building blocks based on our core competencies in processing, and Ethernet connectivity:

• Embedded Intel® Architecture processors, chipsets, and Communications Reference Designs that accelerate the time-to-market development of networked storage.
• iSCSI host bus adapters that enable data sharing over Gigabit Ethernet networks.
• Intel Architecture server platforms and pre-validated RAID-on-motherboard solutions.
• The industry's most advanced storage processor roadmap, including the first Intel product based on the breakthrough performance of Intel® XScale™ microarchitecture.
• Intel® Integrated RAID controllers, reference designs, and RAID management software.
• Comprehensive development tools and software from Intel and a growing list of leading third-party hardware and software vendors.

Intel is using its core competencies to deliver interoperable storage building blocks and products designed to reduce costs and improve time-to-market for equipment manufacturers.

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