Ed this is great news and another first for PTSC to be a part of.
Here is the article in full from the GRCI web site.
GENROCO and Ciprico Publicly Demonstrate the Fastest Storage Subsystem in the World
Over 600 Megabytes per second sustained in High Performance Storage Area Network environment
MINNEAPOLIS, MN. (June 23, 1999) - GENROCO, Inc. (GENROCO) (OTC BB: "GRCI") of Slinger, Wisconsin and Ciprico Inc. (Ciprico) (NASDAQ: "CPCI") of Plymouth, Minnesota demonstrated the world's fastest storage subsystem at the University of Minnesota (UMN) and several other undisclosed locations earlier this month. The demonstration, which ran SCSI over Schedule Transfer (ST) protocol with a peak data transfer rate of 637.5 Megabytes per second, is the framework for the highest bandwidth storage area network (SAN) ever configured with commercially available products.
"This development is very significant in the area of Storage Area Network architecture and performance. It addresses issues in the very high end of the spectrum that are not dealt with by more mainstream products in the Fibre Channel arena," said Tom Ruwart, Assistant Director at the Laboratory for Computational Science and Engineering at UMN. "The demonstration of a 'sustained' 600 MB/sec at this event is truly remarkable and shows the sophistication and maturity of GSN, ST, and associated technologies."
The demonstration utilized a storage subsystem comprised of eight Ciprico 7000 Series Fibre Channel RAID disk arrays connected to eight separate Fibre Channel ports on the GENROCO TURBOstor® Gigabyte System Network (GSN) Storage Array Controller. Schedule Transfer (ST) protocol was run between the GSN storage and an SGI (NYSE:"SGI) Origin 2000 configured with SGI's XIO GSN adapter.
The GENROCO TURBOstor controller served as a proxy for the ST protocol. Host system SCSI commands are transported over GSN using ST and are then translated to Fibre Channel SCSI commands by the controller. GENROCO GSN Storage Array Controllers employ the SGI SuMAC GSN and Hewlett-Packard Tachyon Fibre Channel ASICs, as well as the Patriot Scientific PSC1000 Java Engine CPU.
"High speed storage is important to many of Ciprico's Geospatial Imaging customers," said Rich Vignes, Marketing Manager for Ciprico. "We believe this super high-performance storage solution will deliver major time and cost savings in file storage and retrieval-with these and other applications with data intensive challenges."
"This is just the 'tip of the iceberg'," stated Don Woelz, Vice-President of Marketing for GENROCO. "Over the next several months, we expect to reach transfer rates approaching 800 MB/sec and demonstrate access to the storage via Gigabit Ethernet, HIPPI, and ATM using ST software for Compaq, Sun, IBM, and Intel/NT based clients."
About Schedule Transfer (ST)
ST is a new network protocol designed to allow many times higher bandwidth with much lower host platform overhead than TCP/IP or any other current industry standard. An ST data movement over any type of network commences, or is "scheduled", only when a ready transmit buffer is matched by an equal sized, ready receive buffer at the destination. This allows the sending and receiving engines at endpoints of a network to operate at the highest possible speed and efficiency by eliminating buffer overruns and underruns.
About Gigabyte System Network (GSN)
GSN, is the highest bandwidth and lowest latency open system industry standard (ANSI HIPPI-6400-PH, ANSI NCITS 323-1998), providing full duplex 6400 megabit (800 megabyte) per second channels of error-free, flow controlled data. The technology is ideal wherever organizations require timely movement of large amounts of information including scientific and technical computing, digital TV and movie production, data mining, transaction processing, video and film archiving, and storage management. The ANSI standard provides for interoperability with disparate technologies including Ethernet, Fibre Channel, ATM, HIPPI-800, and other standards. The GSN fabric operates at a full duplex data rate of 1.6 gigabytes per second making it an ideal backbone for multiplexing Fibre Channel storage data streams. It would require nearly 1300 sixteen port Fibre Channel switches to produce the non-blocking bandwidth of a single 32 port GSN switch.
Further information about GSN and ST can be found at hippi.org.
About GENROCO
GENROCO, the first company to deliver open system gigabit Fibre Channel and gigabyte GSN controllers, has been the leading supplier of high performance storage, digital video, and network software and interfaces to such companies as Compaq, Sun, Silicon Graphics, Oracle, Tektronix, and Fujitsu for 25 years. Additional information about GENROCO can be found on the world wide web at genroco.com.
About Ciprico
Ciprico designs, manufactures and markets high-performance storage solutions and professional services for visual computing and digital media industry leaders throughout the world. Ciprico storage solutions are designed for computing applications requiring high speed image capture, full image resolution playback, sustained performance and data protection. Ciprico is headquartered in Minneapolis, MN. More information about Ciprico is available on the world wide web at ciprico.com.
For additional information, contact:
Mr. Carl Pick, Chairman and CEO
Phone: 414-644-8700 Fax: 414-644-6667
EMAIL: info@genroco.com
TURBOstor is a registered trademark of GENROCO, Inc. Gigabyte System Network is a registered trademark of the High Performance Networking Forum which includes such organizations as Compaq, Sun, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, SGI, CERN, and Los Almos National Labs. Ciprico and Ciprico 7000 Series Disk Array are registered trademarks of Ciprico Inc. SGI, SuMAC, and Origin are registered trademarks of SGI. Tachyon is a registered trademark of the Hewlett-Packard Company.
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