With IT budgets cut to the bone during this recession, every expense is under scrutiny, and if companies can do without or delay a purchase for a while, well then they are going to wait. Maybe that's why several vendors have come up with ways to extend the life of existing infrastructure at a lower cost than refreshing everything. Certainly, that's what Igel did a few months back when it introduced PC cards to convert existing and aging PCs into thin clients—thereby extending their useful lives.

And that's what LSI is doing with its new family of controller cards, designed to increase transfer rates for storage devices. It's all about increasing the performance of what a company already has in place without spending a lot of money with a rip-and-replace plan.