GENROCO Demonstrates Next Generation SAN
Technology To ANSI Standards Group
Business Wire - May 21, 1999 16:47
SLINGER, WI--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 21, 1999--GENROCO, Inc.
(GENROCO) (OTC BB: "GRCI") of Slinger, Wisconsin, announced that the
Company demonstrated concurrent Fibre Channel (FC) storage and HIPPI-800
(HIPPI) network traffic over a Gigabyte System Network (GSN) backbone for
the American National Standards Institute(ANSI) T11.1 Working Group
meeting here.
The ANSI committee, made up of experts from many of the world's leading
high performance computing companies and institutions, has been meeting
monthly since 1996 to establish the standards for GSN as well as Scheduled
Transfer (ST; 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). This was the first opportunity for the group to see
the operation of a mixed media Storage Area Network (SAN) based on GSN
and ST.
GENROCO showed its new TURBOstor(R) GSN to FC storage array controller
and TURBOfibre(R) GSN to gigabit network routing bridge interoperate with
other manufacturers' disk subsystems and computer platforms. A GENROCO
storage array controller was connected to two Ciprico (NASDAQ: CPCI) and
two Compaq (NYSE: CPQ) FC RAID subsystems, while a GENROCO network
router was connected via HIPPI to a Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: SUNW)
SPARC and a Compaq ALPHA UNIX servers, with an SGI (NYSE: SGI) UNIX
server attached to the GENROCO hardware over a 1.6 Gigabyte per second
GSN backbone. The three servers did standard TCP/IP networking among
themselves simultaneously with the SGI machine streaming data from the FC
arrays using ST protocol.
Capable of attaching to many terabytes of data and hundreds of high
performance servers, this technology can will used as the building blocks for
next generation HDTV, satellite image processing, and other high performance
networks.
GENROCO plans to add Gigabit Ethernet and ATM support to its GSN router
during 1999. "We will show PC class machines using Gigabit Ethernet to
access Fibre Channel storage without servers this summer," declared Chris
Good, Chief Technical Officer of GENROCO.
GSN, is the highest bandwidth and lowest latency open system industry
standard, 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 Ethernet, Fibre Channel, ATM, HIPPI-800, and other
standards. 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. Further information
about GSN and ST can be found at hnf.org .
"In order to build a non-blocking Fibre Channel fabric with the same
connectivity of a single 32 port GSN switch and 32 GENROCO GSN storage
array controllers, you would need nearly 1300 sixteen port Fibre Channel
switches connected together with an absurd maze of cables," said Roger
Ronald, Chief Engineer for Power Micro Research and T11.1 Committee
Chairman. "Without this new technology, the ultra high performance Storage
Area Networks that are now imagined will be all but impossible to deploy,
operate, and maintain in the real world."
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 .
TURBOstor and TURBOfibre are registered trademarks of GENROCO, Inc.
SPARC is a registered trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc. ALPHA is a
registered trademark of Compaq Computer Corporation. Gigabyte System
Network is a registered trademark of the High Performance Networking Forum.
SOURCE: DigitalWork digitalwork.com
WHERE SMALL BUSINESS GOES TO WORK
CONTACT: GENROCO, Inc., Slinger
Carl A. Pick, CEO, 414/644-8700
Email: carl@genroco.com
Web: genroco.com
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