Vendor battles stall I2O standard
Joe Wilcox
Computer Reseller News
November 30, 1998, Issue: 819
techweb.com
San Francisco -- As vendors war over the future of I/O, the adoption of the existing specification is stalled.
Last week, Intel Corp., IBM Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Compaq Computer Corp. were divided over the Next-Generation I/O (NGIO) specification (CRN, Nov. 23).
To make matters worse, the existing specification, dubbed I2O, established more than two years ago to improve I/O speed, has met with lackluster acceptance in the industry. Only one major OEM, HP, has shipped any products based on the spec as other vendors wait to see how the market develops.
I2O offloads low-level interrupts from the CPU to an I/O processor, greatly enhancing bandwidth to enterprise applications. The standard, however, takes a split-driver approach that is portable across multiple OSes but is more difficult to implement than standard drivers.
"The OS vendor has to provide [its] half of the driver, the ISV has to provide the other half of the driver, and the OEM has to pull it all together. This isn't always easy to do," said Michael Rex, chairman of the marketing group for the I2O Special Interest Group (SIG).
Driver support is clearly the major stumbling block, industry sources said.
In an effort to spur momentum, the I2O SIG worked with OS vendors to get drivers ready and posted on a bulletin board in July. "Once that happened, this gave the ISVs confidence that drivers would commercially be available and they could support it," Rex said. "Now it moves on to the next stage of which OEMs are going to pick up the pieces and build it into a solution."
But OEMs argue customers are not clamoring for I2O and the changing spec-of-the-week undermines industry and customer confidence in the I/O architecture.
"As one of the original steering committee members, we think the technology is still fundamentally sound, but we're taking more of a wait-and-see approach to productization simply because we have yet to see broad software support or adapter-card support to gel within the industry," said Karl Walker, vice president of technology development for Compaq, Houston.
"I can say we support [it] and plan to continue to do so in our products, but demand is not significant at this point," said Tom Bradicich, director of architecture and design for Netfinity servers for IBM.
IBM, like Compaq, is building I2O upgradability into its servers, but the Armonk, N.Y., company is hedging its bets.
"People are waiting for I2O to be the next greatest thing in I/O technology, but customers have not jumped on it," said one OEM source. "I2O has suffered from the spec-of-the-week syndrome: The 1.0, the 1.5, the 1.5a and 2.0 is about to come out." The 2.0 spec, code-named Yellowstone, is due for release during the first half of 1999.
This problem has prevented the industry from rallying around I2O, said an OEM product manager. "Between the system, OS and adapter-card vendors, it's just a moving target," she said.
Palo Alto, Calif.-based HP offers integrated I/O processor support in two products, the LH3 server and NetRAID 3Si network interface card.
"As to why Compaq, Dell [Computer Corp.] and others are not embracing I2O, I can only speculate that they may be distracted," said Gak-Wee Low, HP's product manager for NetServers. "There are suddenly so many choices, and they may be trying to hedge their bets. But at HP, we are not trying to hedge our bets."
A body of five permanent members-HP, Intel Corp., Microsoft Corp., NetFrame Systems Inc. and Novell Inc.-and three elected vendors govern the organization and oversee the I2O spec. Compaq, HP and IBM introduced the PCIx spec in September to the PCI SIG, and that momentum is definitely greater than momentum for I2O, analysts said.
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