FEATURES & COMMENTARY
Albuquerque, N.M. — To further address the need for gigabyte speed networking, Essential Communications, a leading supplier of high speed networking products, announced an agreement to license the rights to VIEO’s Gigabyte System Network (GSN) technology. Under the terms of the agreement Essential has the exclusive right to develop and manufacture products based on VIEO’s GSN technology.
This agreement will strengthen Essential’s leadership position in GSN technology, providing a broader GSN offering and the ability to quickly bring additional high speed networking products to market. Essential will use the technology to develop a GSN PCI-X adapter and an 8-port GSN switch. Essential will develop this technology to ensure that GSN is available for all the major platforms including Sun, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, Cray and SGI. Essential has been shipping the Genessys-32, their 32-port GSN switch, since January of 1999.
GSN is the highest speed standards based networking technology available. It is the only non-proprietary networking technology that can provide the bandwidth and speed to run highly sophisticated simulations, multiple real-time HDTV file transfers and back-up at a rate of 3 terabytes an hour.
Essential is developing GSN for government and commercial markets. VIEO believes that Essential will have greater strength in manufacturing and marketing GSN switches and adapters to a large audience. “These products are eliciting an amazing amount of interest. Essential’s proven expertise in the manufacture, distribution and support of high performance networking products will allow them to deliver GSN products quickly and reliably,” said Newt Hamlin, president of VIEO.
“Our efforts to bring this GSN adapter to market will allow all the major platform vendors to offer GSN as the highest speed, non-proprietary, lowest latency, low CPU load interconnect that can be designed into systems today,”
said Joe Bradley, chief operating officer of Essential. “GSN’s current speed and advanced capabilities have beaten 10 Gigabit Ethernet to the market and we are a few years ahead of Infiniband.”
As a network standard, GSN is the highest bandwidth and lowest latency interconnect available. Providing full duplex, dual 6400 megabit (800 megabyte) per second error-free, reliable, flow-controlled data transfers; GSN technology is suited for organizations that require very fast movement of large amounts of information between servers. It is used where the need for very high speed and excessive bandwidth cannot be compromised.
Essential Communications is a leading provider of high performance networking solutions. Essential’s products are integrated as key building blocks for the world’s fastest supercomputers and largest storage areas networks, and are also used to deliver maximum speed and networking bandwidth to high performance workgroups. The Essential Communications HIPPI and GSN networking product families include switches, analyzers and network interface cards. More information about Essential Communications is available at http://www.esscom.com .
VIEO was founded as Power Micro Research Corporation (PMR) in 1994 in Austin, Texas, as a consulting company with a focus in high speed networking, I/O architecture and protocol optimization. Today VIEO has offices in Austin, Dallas, and Minneapolis, and has begun the transition to a product company positioning itself as the emerging market leader in Infiniband management solutions. More information about VIEO is available at http://www.vieo.com . ============================================================