HYDERABAD: "We are going to invest between $ 4 million to $10 million in our Indian operations, which also includes investments at our Bangalore software development center. But majority of investment will be put into the Hyderabad center," said David A Sommers, Vice President at Adaptec. The company is also in the process of setting up a Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) compatibility-testing lab in Hyderabad. "We have an excellent workforce of 48 software professionals here and we are going to leverage this by creating a iSCSI compatibility testing lab within our development center in Hyderabad. More than $ 1.5 million will be invested towards accomplishing this task," he added. iSCSI is a new Internet Protocol-based storage networking standard for linking data storage facilities, developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force. By carrying commands over IP networks, iSCSI is used to facilitate data transfers over Intranets and to manage storage over long distances. The iSCSI protocol is among the key technologies expected to help bring about rapid development of the storage area network market by increasing the capabilities and performance of storage data transmission. Because of the ubiquity of IP networks, iSCSI could be used to transmit data over local area networks, wide area networks or the Internet and can enable location-independent data storage and retrieval. The company is developing futuristic products in this area and first batch of products would be ready for market by the end of February 2003. "By early next year we will be releasing three products ISCSI – Target, iSCSI-Initiator and iSCSI-Network Accelerator in the worldwide market. These products will help design new generation of ultra-fast storage solutions," Sommers informed. The company also plans to increase its Bangalore software development center strength to 50 people from the current count of two within a span of three years.