It’s been a bit difficult to write this month with a death in the family, a product launch (“Valux to focus on MinutePitch “) with a partner (Valux), a paper (“Lessons Learned in Massive Video Production (MVP) for University Alumni Outreach“) for ACE2004 in Singapore last month (at the same time as the death, sigh), a wedding, and a funeral. So I’m only now looking at some serious comments regarding my earlier paper (“All You Need is TCP: EtherSAN and Storage Networks“) for the global storage workshop.
Greg Pfister of IBM, Mr. “In Search of Clusters”, was kind enough to provide some feedback on the paper. His questions were to the point – I needed to explain better 1) “What is an EtherSAN?” and 2) “Why Should I care? As he said “Answer those two questions. It can be done in 6 pages. It can be done, in fact, in one page.” So here it is, in a page for everyone who asked me this.
Ethersan is unique in being a single, comprehensive technology object, used in processors, networks and peripherals, whose expression in each is different, yet each uses the same mechanism from a different perspective. Like Intel’s Pentium, the same core can be expressed with strikingly different products, yet is the same core.