Accelerating down the road to Mandalay

SPRING IS IN the air in Las Vegas, which means it is time for the annual Networld Interop (N+I) Conference.

Although the show has moved from the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) to the Mandalay Bay Hotel, all the top names in networking technologies were present. The only notable company missing from last year's conference was Microsoft.

Rivals Broadcom and Intel were there, showing off their competing network acceleration technologies. Cisco, 3Com, and Avaya were demonstrating their latest VOIP offerings. D-Link, Linksys and Netgear were hawking their enterprise-level hardware. Netgear also had a prototype of a barebone Network Attached Server which supported to PATA drives.

Despite the recent lawsuit brought by a Silicon Valley patent holder Alacritech, as we reported here, both Broadcom and Intel seem confident that Longhorn will still debut and things seem to be moving in a positive way. We should expect to learn more in the very near future.

Intel showed off its I/O Acceleration Technology, but declined to comment on benchmarks made by HP that showed losses on all fronts to other network acceleration technologies. Slides I saw from a presentation made at Microsoft's WinHEC, included an embedded file showing a lower-than-expected performance from Intel's I/O AT technology.

Broadcom showed off its new BCM5708S, which is the first 2.5 Gigabit C-NIC (converged network interface controller). The 2.5 Gigabit NetXtreme II C-NIC is optimized for embedded blade server applications. Also at the Broadcom booth, a PCI Express NetXtreme II demo was shown running TOE (TCP/IP offload engine), RDMA and iSCSI protocols at the same time over a single Ethernet connection.

MIMO-based wireless products, not to be confused with 802.11n or Pre-N technologies were on display from top chipset manufacturers. According to many of these, 802.11n is still on track to make a mainstream appearance in mid to late 2006. µ