We believe that with lowering costs of 10-Gbit/s Ethernet, over time it can open up a market similar to what Fibre Channel did for storage memory. The Aarohi next-gen silicon which is due out next year will give us a platform to provide high performance offload for 10-Gbit/s Ethernet. We will take all the technologies that we have built into the Fibre Channel HBAs and build them into our Ethernet HBAs.
[Fibre Channel] has got very, very entrenched in most of the data centers -- people trust it to manage their storage. It's a more mature market, but it's not growing the way it was four or five years ago.
I think with the emergence of 10-Gbit/s Ethernet, there will be some cannibalization, although we see it as compatible with Fibre Channel -- there's various techniques to bridge Fibre Channel over IP networks.
Byte & Switch: Your rival QLogic has put its faith in InfiniBand. Do you have any plans to support the technology? (See QLogic Showcases Platform and QLogic Eyes SilverStorm.)
McCluney: We looked at it and we think that it will be a good niche and vertical market [product] -- it's finding a great place in clustering and High Performance Computing (HPC). Our focus is more on where the broader market is going, hence our investment in Ethernet. We have no InfiniBand plans at the moment.
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