ACADEMIA

Advance Orders From Naval Research Labs Follow Successful Completion of Extensive Trials: Telecommunications equipment maker Network Equipment Technologies announced that it has received initial advance orders for its NX5010 high-speed switching platform, to be shipped upon general availability of the product, which is expected shortly. Jointly developed by NET and Bay Microsystems, the leader in high performance packet processing solutions, the NX5010 is a compact, scalable, 10 gigabit per second multi-service aggregation and switching platform. The NX5010 provides a powerful solution for mission-critical communications in response to increasing demand for secure, high speed, versatile networking. Initially targeted at government and financial customers, the NX5010 enables geographically dispersed data centers to connect and enables multiple components currently required to perform SAN-to-WAN communications to be replaced and collapsed into a single system. The first release of the platform, designed to provide high-speed SAN to WAN communications and secure grid computing, was tested extensively by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). Following the trials, NRL awarded NET and Bay an initial advance order for multiple units, which are targeted for use within NRL’s test bed for Advanced Network and Advanced Terabit Storage Area Networking trials. The units will be shipped upon general availability of the product, which is expected shortly. “We tested the NX5010 extensively during the past six months, with results that exceeded our expectations,” said Dr. Hank Dardy, Chief Scientist, Supercomputing Research Lab – U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. “The performance of the NX5010 was exceptional. The first-of-its-kind test set-up transferred 60 terabytes of InfiniBand data over a distance of 4500 km in only 32 hours. We believe this is the largest amount of InfiniBand data ever transferred per unit time over a wide area network.” “We are very excited to add the NX5010 product, as well as 10 Gbps interfaces to our product portfolio. NET and Bay have been working closely over the past year on the development of this platform, and are extremely pleased with the feedback from our early trials,” said John Sandschulte, VP of Engineering at NET. “Not only were we able to meet NRL’s high standards for reliability and throughput, but were able to surpass their expectations.” "We are very pleased by the results of the NRL trials,” said Chuck Gershman, president and CEO, Bay Microsystems, Inc. “This first-ever achievement in WAN data-transfer capacity and performance exemplifies the processing power and agility of the NX5010 powered by Bay’s network processors. The successful collaboration with our OEM partner, NET, continues to validate Bay’s world class system level design support and ability to accelerate our partners time to market.”. The NX5010 utilizes Bay Microsystems’ industry leading Biscayne and Montego programmable packet processors to enable line-rate multiservice protocol conversion and transport with hard QoS (Quality of Service) management capabilities. As an agile high-speed exchange, the NX5010 enables geographically distributed computing and storage resources to operate as if they were co-located within the same LAN or data center.