A pair of storage vendors this week were all aflutter after inking large distribution deals for their products.

Adaptec made some inroads with motherboard makers to have its Serial ATA chips built-in designs from Asustek, Gigabyte, Supermicro and Tyan. This opens a path to Adaptec's HostRAID software and RAID add-in cards for workstation and server customers. In addition, it should help further Adaptec's push to sell direct attached and NAS (network attached storage) hardware.

Adaptec uses the same software to manage its SCSI, Serial ATA and upcoming Serial Attached SCSI products. Serial ATA gives customers a lower cost storage option than high-performing SCSI products.

Alacritech also scored a big win for its TCP/IP offload cards, signing a distribution agreement with Ingram Micro.

"There’s a growing demand for solutions that incorporate the kinds of products that Alacritech offers. Right away, we’ll be able to offer Alacritech Accelerators as part of a solution for our HP Authorized resellers that targets a specific need for the HP server customers. We’re pleased to extend this technology to our resellers and their customers," said Lori Snow, a vice president at Ingram Micro US.

Alacritech's products offload TCP/IP requests from server CPUs to help speed up overall performance. ®