Adaptec upgrades SCSI kit; invests in startup

Electronic News, Oct 20, 1997 by Cynthia Bournellis

San Jose, Calif.--After a period of silence on the I/O front, Adaptec CEO and chairman Grant Saviers opened up about Adaptec's plans for the small computer systems interface, or SCSI, technology.

Mr. Saviers said it was time that the industry heard more from Adaptec, which is in the business of bandwidth and I/O. "We are boosting the performance of SCSI and are in the fastest product lifecycle in our 16-year history," said Mr. Saviers last week, during a conference call with industry press.

Adaptec, which started the SCSI revolution in 1986, just released a new 32-bit/64-bit PCI Ultra2 SCSI development kit, to OEMs of next-generation workstations and servers, some of which will be announced at the Comdex trade show next month in Las Vegas. The kit contains an evaluation board, Adaptec's AIC-7891 Ultra2 chip, Windows NT drivers and installation software and cables. The products are the first based on Adaptec's Ultra2 chips and boards which offer greater bandwidth, and throughput burst rates of 80 megabytes per second. In addition, the new technology increases cable lengths to 12 meters. Ultra3 SCSI silicon will be sampled to OEMs next year, said Mr. Saviers.

In the meantime, Adaptec will ship dual channel Ultra2 controllers and silicon, which will deliver data at 166MBps. At this point, the industry will have arrived at a saturation point for the 32-bit PCI system bus, said Mr. Saviers, adding that 64-bit PCI will become the new standard for high-performance servers and workstations.

Meanwhile, Adaptec made a cash investment in a new startup focusing on mass storage for the Windows NT server market. Based in San Jose, Calif., Ridge Technologies said it will working with Adaptec on integrating Adaptec's SCSI and Fiber Channel technologies with interface software from Ridge, for storage subsystems products. Ridge plans to begin selling devices to PC OEMs who have server divisions, during the first half of 1998. These OEMs will put their own brand name on the products, and at some point, Ridge said it will sell Ridge-branded systems. Ridge products will sit in Unix hardware centers and remote offices along with NT servers, because, "storage management is becoming more distributed and networked," said Ed Turner, VP of marketing and sales at Ridge."

Ridge's business model is one of partnerships. In addition to Adaptec, who will serve as OEM to Ridge for Fiber Channel boards and host bus adapters. Ridge will work with other OEMs such as disk drive and enclosure manufacturers, in order to offer a complete storage subsystems package. "There are pieces of storage technology all around the (Silicon) Valley, and we are going to pull those pieces together," said Greg Zehr, executive VP of engineering at Ridge. Mr. Zehr came to Ridge from Apple, where he managed the mass storage group.

Formed in May by top managers from Sun Microsystems and Apple Computer, Ridge believes it has entered the storage subsystems market at the right time, as the next version of Windows NT 5.0 will have better clustering capabilities and support for mission-critical applications, increasing the demand for storage. According to figures from International Data Corp., a market research firm, worldwide revenue of NT server shipments will triple from $6 billion this year to $19 billion by 2001.

Along with its SCSI products, Ridge said it will put much of its engineering energy into developing Fibre Channel and RAID storage subsystems. Fibre Channel is a high-speed serial interface that transmits information at 100MBps. "We'll see Fiber Channel take over at the high end of SCSI...it naturally fits in with arrays," said Mr. Turner. He said future products from Ridge could be RAID systems with 10 to 20 hard drives.

Other technologies that will enable Ridge's success, in addition to Windows NT 5.0, will be Microsoft's Wolfpack clustering software, which will increase demand for external storage. Another opportunity is Fibre Channel at the front end-- where an external cable connects a PC to a server, for example, as opposed to a back-end design where Fibre Channel is on a PC hard drive.

Ridge could dominate the substorage systems market, said a spokesperson for Adaptec. "There are not a lot of big gorillas here, just lots of chimpanzees." Mid-range competitors include Trimm Technologies, Box Hill Systems Corp. and Artecon. "They aren't serious I/O companies," said Mr. Turner, referring to medium-size players in general. "We will (eventually) compete with companies like Symbios Technologies and Clariion." This is without mentioning Storage Technology Corp., who now has its own Fibre Channel plan. The company last week said it will implement connectivity into its StorageNet and Nearline multiplatform disk and tape products. Conversely, StorageTek released its first Fibre Channel product, the 9137 30-Slot disk subsystem, which features a Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop host attachment and support for SCSI.

In the meantime, customers can't wait. "They are asking for 30 terabytes of storage," said Mr. Turner. He said the airline industry is one example where data is being replicated three to four times in order to track real-time pricing.