First Not Foremost

A new round of trade shows starts this week, with Storage Networking World in San Diego. It's an opportunity for hands-on access to suppliers and their roadmaps. It's also a chance to hobnob with peers and freshen connections. (See our latest poll to give us your particular take on this week's confab.)

For many, a trade show like SNW is also a time to confront the dark side of storage networking -- the hype and manipulation that all too often accompany the selling. A key element in this is the race to be "first" out of the gate with a hot technology -- adapter, chip, switch, port speed, virtualized server, whatever.

Case in point: If you've perused our message boards lately, perhaps you've tracked a teapot tempest over 10-Gbit/s chips and adapters. It all erupted over claims by startup NetXen to be the first product of its kind to hit the streets. (See NetXen Singles Out 10-Gig.)

On background, we must come clean. Despite journalistic skepticism, we fell right into the trap. When NetXen claimed to be first, we bit, and right on cue, got bitten by another supplier, Myricom, making the same claim.

Back at the drawing board, it seemed there were indeed some distinctions that required clarification. Myricom was first out of the gate with a programmable PCIe 10-Gbit/s Ethernet chip, which was in deployment by a range of OEMs and resellers. (See Myricom Brings HPC to Ethernet and Myricom, Foundry Push 10-Gig.)