As the network becomes the computer, I/O becomes the center of enterprise network computing. Intelligent NICs are the only workhorses capable of handling the I/O. Not only are they I/O capable, they are optimal at that chore.
Multiple iNICs will be needed in all enterprise servers and in all NAS devices. Also, they will be popular in workstations (if GbE takes servers to their knees, guess what happens to workstations?).
Allen, my knowledge is usually quite inadequate to discuss some of the technical topics you raise; however, this particular area is one in which I have some expertise. I agree that this is an extremely important solution. At my previous company, I was involved as an engineer on Storage Management-related product development, and I can tell you that production system CPU utilization for network I/O was a major issue. At that time, we investigated building an "appliance" from commodity components to off-load data management tasks (data movement, backup, etc.) from the production systems' CPUs in a fibre channel SAN environment. IP over fibre channel was one of the simplest ways to move the data; however, the problem we faced was the following: If we used a standard commodity Intel server as the "appliance," the CPU resource required to move the packets through the TCP/IP stack could quickly overwhelm even a high-end Intel server. Of course, this greatly increased the cost of this "appliance." An alternate solution was to use SCSI over fibre channel; however, this was much, much more complex. What WIND announced with TINA appears to be exactly what we needed at the time. The use of iNICS would have allowed us to off-load all this TCP/IP overhead, accomplishing the data movement with a much cheaper server (not to mention the fact that, the iNICS might have obviated the "appliance" altogether for some environments).
Had iNICS been possible, we'd probably have then hit the next latent bottleneck: the SCI bus. For this problem, it would have been Infiniband to the rescue...
One question I have though: How high is the barrier to entry for these iNICS. Seems like something someone like QLogic or Emulex might want to undertake themselves, bypassing the WIND IP. |
