by Tim Staub, Associate Editor
Dallas, TEXAS — VIEO has been developing high-speed I/O solutions since 1994, focusing on I/O system architecture and performance, embedded systems and systems management. Their Fortune 100 customers include the major server and interconnect providers. Now, they provide software solutions for the new standard in I/O: the InfiniBand Architecture.
HPCwire recently spoke with Steve Harriman, vice president of marketing for VIEO Inc. Steve joined VIEO in August 2000. He has over 25 years in IT management and product marketing. Most recently, Steve was VP Marketing of Sterling Software.
HPCwire: What is your most current development and primary focus?
Harriman: This year we were renamed VIEO to concentrate on delivering InfiniBand “software solutions.” We were formerly Power Micro Research, started in ’94 by CTO James Mott and Chief Software Architect Jim Cox to develop high performance I/O solutions. We develop fabric management software and middleware for OEM partners. We are currently partnering with leading companies who will be delivering InfiniBand enabled products. The companies we support manufacture servers, storage arrays, switches, routers, appliances and adapters, and software vendors who provide management platforms and enterprise applications. We support leading InfiniBand semiconductor companies and are actively developing partnerships with hardware vendors to provide InfiniBand software that allows the user to exploit InfiniBand technology.
VIEO software makes it possible to implement and manage complex, heterogeneous InfiniBand fabrics. Also, we enable very high performance InfiniBand clustered applications. VIEO’s focus on I/O system architecture and performance, embedded systems and systems management allows us to use our experience to provide software solutions for InfiniBand Architecture – the new standard in I/O.
HPCwire: What does InfiniBand do?
Harriman: InfiniBand is a standards based switched fabric I/O architecture developed by the InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA), a consortium led by Compaq, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and Sun to address the needs of the Internet economy. With amazing eBusiness growth and massive expansion of data storage and networks, Infiniband balances processor, memory and I/O subsystem performance and provides flexibility and scalability. The PCI bus structure will eventually be replaced by InfiniBand architecture.
HPCwire: What is the VIEO Fabric Manager?
The VIEO Fabric Manager is the first software product we will deliver to OEM partners early next year in conjunction with the first InfiniBand silicon. It runs in general purpose operating systems on hosts and in embedded real-time operating systems in switches and I/O devices, delivering a complete software stack of subnet manager and general services functions. Naturally, it complies fully with the InfiniBand Architecture 1.0 specification, and open APIs allow OEM partners to provide their own value-add extensions. In addition, the VIEO Fabric Manager will provide InfiniBand instrumentation to conventional network and SAN management tools, such as Tivoli TME and Veritas SANpoint. An early version of the product was demonstated at the IBTA Fall 2000 Developers’ Conference in Las Vegas and at SC2000 in Dallas last week using VIEO’s InfiniBand fabric simulator, a development environment wihch allows us build and test code before InfiniBand-enabled hardware is available.
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