CLOUD

Engenio Information Technologies, Inc., a global provider of innovative, highly scalable, modular storage systems for the open enterprise, joined more than 30 vendors at the University of New Hampshire's InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL) 4 Gigabit per second (4 Gbps) Fibre Channel "plugfest." Engenio's native 4 Gbps disk array technology was the industry's first to be tested for compliance with the latest Fibre Channel Industry Association 4 Gbps protocol. Other plugfest participants included manufacturers of host adapters, switches, loop switches, Fibre Channel components, routers/bridges, drive decoders, disk drives, disk array controllers and routers. The plugfest was organized to ensure that 4 Gbps technology from different manufacturers interoperates and complies with the industry-standard 4 Gbps protocol. Special considerations were given to compatibility testing with current 2Gbps and legacy 1Gbps devices to ensure full and continuous backward compatibility. "The plugfest provides developers the first opportunity to test interoperability with other 4 Gbps technology, including our native 4 Gbps disk array," said Steve Gardner, Engenio Director of Product Marketing. "The FCIA plugfest is a critical step toward the market introduction of 4 Gbps products, expected in the coming months." High performance computing customers including those in the oil and gas exploration, entertainment and government research industries are expected to be early adopters of 4 Gbps technology. Analysts predict that the new technology will be priced competitively when compared with today's existing 2 Gbps technology. With 4 Gbps technology, users can reduce the time to load a single threaded 4.5 TB data set by almost 40 percent compared with today's 2 Gbps speeds. Faster data transfers can reduce processing times and increase productivity. The Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) is a nonprofit international organization of manufacturers, systems integrators, developers, systems vendors, industry professionals and end users that are committed to delivering a broad base of Fibre Channel infrastructure to support a wide array of industry applications within the mass storage and IT-based arenas. The UNH-IOL is a non-profit organization that offers interoperability and compliance testing through 19 technology-based groups. Test solutions created at the UNH-IOL offer a set of methods to increase interoperability through protocol operations, signaling, point-to-point and multi-system scenarios.