Stories about: Alacritech

In a sign of the growing importance of IP networked storage the SNIA has elected new leaders to an IP Storage Forum and outlined an activity program.

In response to IT demands for increased efficiency in managing diskless and blade servers, storage-area network vendors have begun crafting next-generation tools that perform advanced server provisioning. Tools such as Brocade's Tapestry Application Resource Manager, Microsoft's Virtual Hard Disk or Emulex's N-Port ID Virtualization are proving much easier to use than predecessors such as boot-from-SAN and logical-unit-number cloning.

Microsoft has reached a licensing agreement with networking technology vendor Alacritech that will remove Microsoft's forthcoming TCP Chimney software from the legal limbo it's been stuck in for the past several months, following a patent dispute.

Storage start-up Montilio is set to announce a network adapter and software it says will accelerate file server performance by as much as three to six times.

An exhaustive summary of the SNW (Storage Networking World) show, inclusive of speeches, live demos, and training sessions, would probably fill a large book -- maybe two, if we include sideshows such as golfing and dinners. As I write this, the show is still going on; so instead of giving you a summary, I'll outline the major trends emerging so far.

A court is blocking Microsoft from using a networking feature planned for the future operating system code-named Longhorn and a service pack for Windows Server 2003 that had been scheduled to come out last year, according to a company suing Microsoft over the technology.

Alacritech this week released eight new server network interface cards that combine multi-port Gigabit Ethernet connectivity with a TCP/IP offload chip for speeding application processing.

Specialized network interface cards that can open up more bandwidth for transporting data between storage devices and application servers are making inroads with corporate users, as prices fall and the Internet SCSI protocol catches on.

We know what iSCSI is - a protocol that defines how devices move block-level storage data over IP links. But what can iSCSI do for you?

Microsoft became the latest vendor to adopt the iSCSI protocol intended for transporting storage data using Gigabit Ethernet.

The long-delayed iSCSI standard is set to gain Internet Engineering Task Force approval within weeks, which means it's "put up or shut up" time for vendors that have cited its incompleteness as justification for failing to support the IP storage specification in their arrays.