NEWS BRIEFS
Tokyo, JAPAN — GENROCO, Inc., a world leader in Storage Area Network (SAN) technology, demonstrated networking over a 10 gigabit optical link and announced the availability of their new high speed switch fabric to the Japanese supercomputer industry at the Okura Hotel last week. The Company’s DataPropulsion Enterprise switch, which has been designed to connect many of the new gigabyte per second storage and message passing networks including 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GigE), SONET/OC192, and InfiniBand (IB), at wire speed, was highlighted at a high performance storage and networking symposium.
The demonstration included the first implementation of GSN, an industry standard 10 gigabit network, with an optical interface. “Having optical GSN is important not only for large users, such as Japan’s Earth Simulator Project, but also for smaller network installations that demand the flexibility of optical fiber,” said Michael McGowen, Chief Scientist at GENROCO.
The new, network topology independent switch fabric is based on the Company’s ANSI standard based Gigabyte System Network (GSN) backbone which GENROCO began shipping last year. The industry leading firm has already delivered full bandwidth bridging to Gigabit Ethernet (GigE), HIPPI, and Fibre Channel (FC). An OC48 variant was demonstrated the previous week at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.
“Most of the current providers of gigahertz switches didn’t design their fabrics to scale to ten times that speed,” says GENROCO Vice President of Research and Development, Joseph Nordman. “They will need to start from scratch to create gigabyte per second products. GENROCO has had years of experience with our 8000 megabit per second GSN backbone which was designed to simply increase the clock speed by a nominal rate to get to 10 gigabit per second speeds.” In addition to the multi-protocol switch exhibit, GENROCO and Tokyo Electron, Ltd, the Company’s Japanese distributor, also showed GENROCO’s new Internet Storage Router (iSR) running Tivoli SANergy software on a GigE SAN, as well as Sun, Compaq, SGI, and IBM UNIX platforms running 10 gigabit storage and network traffic.
GENROCO, Inc. is a 26 year old, publicly traded engineering and marketing company that specializes in developing I/O solutions for users of high performance storage area networks (SANs). GENROCO enjoys a global customer base that includes Compaq, Fujitsu, SGI, Sun, StorageTek, the U.S. Departments of Defense and Energy, CERN, and other research institutions. Additional information about GENROCO can be found at http://www.genroco.com .
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