ACADEMIA

SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- Lane15(tm) Software, a leading provider of InfiniBand(tm) management software, today announced it will be demonstrating the high sustained data transfer rate capabilities of an InfiniBand subnet using Lane15 management software during the InfiniBand Solutions Conference, April 9-11, 2002 at the San Francisco Hyatt Regency in San Francisco. The Lane15 Application Enabler(tm) product using the Lane15 Channel Interface and a Lane15 implementation of VIPL has shown a sustained rate of 140-150MBs with less than two percent CPU utilization. In related news, Lane15 Software will also showcase two new features of the Lane15 Fabric Manager. The first is support for multi-port/multi-HCA management capability within a single server and the second is fail-over capability. On display at the InfiniBand Solution Conference is an enterprise solution featuring IBM DB2 Database Software running unmodified over an InfiniBand subnet. DB2 supports the VIPL interface on multiple platforms and can exploit the InfiniBand fabric with its currently shipping release DB2 V7.2 EEE. Applications, such as DB2, are expected to run over InfiniBand subnets that will deliver high-speed data transfers with low protocol overhead and OS bypass technology to yield high data throughput with minimal CPU overhead. This demonstration validates the Lane15 Application Enabler as an appropriate interface for high-speed, low latency access to InfiniBand subnets. "Lane15 management software running on IBM DB2 database software will provide data centers the performance, reliability and manageability customers need to gain more value from their e-business infrastructure," said Lauren Flaherty, vice president of marketing, IBM Data Management Solutions. "The broad industry support for InfiniBand will increase the flexibility with which customers can combine the scalable capabilities of DB2 with high performance and low latency InfiniBand adapters and switches on a variety of operating systems." "As data center planners begin to evaluate InfiniBand this year, the InfiniBand development community has to deliver the promises of both high performance and sustained availability," said Terry Dickson, vice president of marketing at Lane15 Software. "The availability of InfiniBand support in IBM DB2, coupled with high data transfer rates, and fail-over are pivotal as customers move into pilot programs for evaluating InfiniBand as part of their e-business infrastructure strategy." "InfiniBand Technology is poised to become a key part of the e-business infrastructure, delivering massively scalable, available, adaptive and easily managed networking infrastructure for the data center," said Vernon Turner, group vice president at IDC. "The Lane15 achievements in data transfer rates and support of DB2 over InfiniBand technology will be an important ingredient in the roll out of this technology." The LAE product consists of a Lane15 implementation of the InfiniBand-defined Communications Manager and VIPL channel driver supplying an industry standard protocol over InfiniBand hardware. The Lane15 Channel Interface is a state-driven implementation that handles the complexities of connection setup and tear down, then gets "out of the way" when it comes to data transfers by providing direct access to the Host Channel Adapter (HCA) data transfer verbs. This year when IT managers evaluate InfiniBand solutions for their data centers, denser configurations of servers along with high availability and fail-over features are expected to be important assessment criteria. The InfiniBand architecture is designed to be a robust, fault tolerant fabric. The multi-port/multi-HCA management capability will allow denser server configurations for 2002 shipments. The Lane15 Fabric Manager subnet manager fail-over feature is crucial to achieving the high-level of reliability that the InfiniBand Architecture promises. The fail-over design allows for multiple subnet managers (SM) to participate on a fabric to backup a negotiated master SM. Lane15 is demonstrating the ability to recover a fabric when a master SM is removed from the fabric. A demonstration version of the Lane15 Fabric Console makes the SM fail-over functionality visible to users. For more information visit www.lane15.com.