NTAP--Monday July 31, 7:59 am Eastern Time
Company Press Release
SOURCE: Giganet, Inc.
Giganet and Network Appliance Form Joint Development Relationship
Companies to Address Ethernet Performance for Network-Attached Storage
CONCORD, Mass., July 31 /PRNewswire/ -- Giganet®, Inc. a
leader in VI- based data center networks, and Network Appliance, Inc. (Nasdaq: NTAP - news), the leading provider of network-attached data access and content management systems, today announced a joint development relationship to enhance Giganet's new VI/IP technology for Network Appliance(TM) systems. Giganet's VI/IP products will enable new levels of performance over existing networking infrastructures, allowing network storage environments to take full advantage of the effectiveness of the Virtual Interface (VI) Architecture standard.
Giganet's VI/IP products are the industry's first products to implement VI -based networking over standard Gigabit Ethernet (see related announcement today ``Giganet announces the Industry's first VI over Ethernet Products'').
``Network Appliance's relationship with Giganet will result in an optimization of the performance and benefits of VI networking,'' said Mark Santora, senior vice president of marketing, Network Appliance. ``With industry leaders like Network Appliance and Giganet working jointly to deliver a standards-based and simplified approach to storage management and deployment, customers will benefit from solutions that provide increased scalability and high performance.''
NAS environments support demanding applications such as Web-based e- commerce, data warehousing, and decision support, and have communication requirements that hinge on the constant, rapid transfer of high volumes of data and files among servers and/or appliances. This creates a level of administrative, intersystem communication that drains significant CPU resources, slowing response time and access to critical data. By implementing high-performance VI-based networking through VI/IP, NAS environments will be able to break the network resource bottleneck and unlock the full performance potential of Network Appliance filers over existing Ethernet networks.
``We are very excited to be teaming with Network Appliance on such an important technology initiative,'' said Gareth Taube, Giganet's senior vice president of sales and marketing. ``Our VI experience and Network Appliances' network-attached storage expertise will provide the kind of performance required for today's demanding e-commerce environments.''
Giganet has also recently joined with Network Appliance in the Direct Access File System (DAFS) Collaborative. DAFS is an effort to promote a standard for VI-based file system access across a network. (See previous announcement ``Giganet Joins Network Appliance Initiative to Enable High- Performance Network-Attached Storage,'' June 22, 2000).
VI Networking Leadership
Giganet has extensive experience in VI-based networks, having developed many of the original VI concepts that form the basis for today's standard. The VI Architecture is widely supported in the industry as a powerful solution to high-performance server networking. Giganet was the first company to implement the standard into a single ASIC chip design, allowing servers to communicate at unprecedented speeds, with greatly reduced systems overhead and low latency (delay). By implementing VI, applications can communicate with each other directly, bypassing the operating system and protocol stacks. Giganet has extended VI's inherent capabilities with a patent pending architecture called RapidFlow(TM). RapidFlow further improves network performance by reducing network congestion. The VI/IP products extend VI by implementing the unique capabilities of Giganet's VI over a standard Ethernet network.
About Giganet, Inc.
Giganet is a leading provider of high-performance system and storage networks. Giganet networking products are based on the Virtual Interface (VI) standard. Internet applications and data running over Giganet VI-enabled networks experience greater performance and scalability, delivering more data to more users, faster. Giganet is a privately held corporation, headquartered in Concord, Mass. The company can be reached at (978) 461-0402 or giganet.com.
Giganet is a registered trademark of Giganet Corporation. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies.
Network Appliance is a trademark of Network Appliance, Inc. in the US and other countries.
SOURCE: Giganet, Inc. |
