on a dedicated adapter board. A board is obviously bulkier, consumes much more power, costs commensurately more than a single chip, and is almost per definition less reliable than an integrated circuit. The SPP approach from Trebia can be characterized as a next-generation design as it offers an improvement both in price/performance and the level of integration while allowing the flexibility through programmability to adapt the functionality to newer protocols and applications. This ensures that products do not become easily obsolete or field service and uprgradability is not compromised. These characteristics should allow the company's customers to accelerate their time to market for new affordable and high-performance SAN-related products. This technology should include the follow- ing products: SAN switches/routers/gateways. Legacy LAN internetworking systems (bridges/gateways), which are in need of storage networking interfaces in order to expand their marketability. Storage on LAN converged systems that offer both LAN and SAN solutions. Endpoint solutions such as servers/HBAs, storage systems, and even NAS devices. CASE STUDY 2: SILVERBACK SYSTEMS iSNAP™ ARCHITECTURE Silverback Systems (www.silverbacksystems.com) takes another relevant but distinct approach in the design of their Storage Network Access Processor (iSNAP) chip. The company embarked on the design of an SNP that has the following unique characteristics: Provides an integrated chip solution that minimizes component cost, solution cost by the mere impact on the chip count, and power consumption while maximizing reliability (as there are less components that can fail by heat radiation caused by other components, for example). 2. It is assumed that the reader is familiar with the detailed operation of the TCP protocol over IP, where in order to guarantee the reliability of the link, all received frames have to be systematically acknowledged by the transmission of ACK messages. Any textbook on TCP/IP internals explains this topic in depth. See, for e