"Our customers tell us that ESI was a fine stopgap measure, but they wanted something faster and more efficient," Brokaw says.
Because the VSC120 doesn't consume extra drive time in order to achieve monitoring functions, Vitesse says it has been able to pack special functions into the chip. These include the ability to initiate status checks on its own, without having to be prompted by a host computer.
"The chip can act as an initiator," says Brokaw. It can be programmed to sense a problem and then to take action to signal, or "interrogate" a bad drive, then send an alarm to the host computer.
Vitesse's claim to be first to market with a direct-attached enclosure controller appears to hold water so far. Its chief rival in this particular market, QLogic Corp. (Nasdaq: QLGC), says its 2-Gbit/s Fibre Channel enclosure controllers rely on ESI.
Qlogic says that, so far, this hasn't been a problem for any of its customers, which include the likes of Compaq, Dell, IBM, and Fujitsu Ltd.
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