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Ammasso, Inc., a developer of high performance, Ethernet-based server-to-server networking technology, today announced the release of the Ammasso 1100, the world's first high performance, low latency, RDMA-enabled Ethernet Adapter. By exploiting existing infrastructure, new RDMA standards and advanced technology, Ammasso enables enterprise applications, clustered databases, high performance computing, and storage infrastructure to perform as never before. The Ammasso 1100 is designed to work within existing Ethernet infrastructures, using existing switches, cables, and trained personnel. It increases performance of application to application data transfers by 5 to 10 times by lowering message latency, offloading the host CPU, and leveraging RDMA. Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) is a set of technologies that enable the movement of data from the memory of one server directly into the memory of another without involving either operating system, thus reducing CPU usage and increasing performance. "End user research indicates that over half of all technical clusters are configured with Ethernet," said Chris Willard, research vice president of Workstations and High Performance Computing Systems at IDC. "However for Ethernet to maintain its position in the marketplace, particularly in technical computing where ever increasing applications volume and requirements for parallel performance generate requirements for ever more capable communications technology, it must keep pace with competing technologies while maintaining competitive pricing. Performance improvements, such as those provided by Ammasso's technology, are particularly important in areas like clustering, where the speed of communications between nodes is a major factor in determining appropriate applications, overall performance, and the upper limits of system scalability." In response to these challenges, RDMA protocol standards (like iWARP) are being defined by organizations like the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the RDMA Consortium. These protocols enable the use of RDMA across network infrastructures. "We have made a significant investment in developing high performance storage technology that exploits the advantages of iWARP," said David Ford, Director of Engineering from Network Appliance, Inc. "RDMA over Ethernet enables the broad adoption of high performance IP-based I/O for storage and clustering in the data center." Application programming interface standards are enabling a range of applications to simply leverage the benefits of this technology. In the scientific application arena, MPI (Message Passing Interface) has been a de- facto standard for a number of years, while in the enterprise space, DAPL (Direct Access Provider Library), a newer standard, is gaining strong support. The Ammasso 1100 provides native support for both MPI and DAPL applications assuring maximum performance. "We see this as a huge step enabling customers to leverage their Ethernet experience and infrastructure in new areas," said Ken Cheng, vice president of marketing for Foundry Networks. "As a leading provider of high-performance enterprise and service provider switching, routing and Web traffic management solutions, we have found that customers using high performance clusters need a combination of wire-speed 1GigE and 10GigE switches as well as technology within their servers to maximize their application performance. We are pleased to see Ammasso delivering this type of product into the marketplace." "We believe that the Ammasso 1100 will, once again, show how Ethernet responds to the needs of users by bring proven technologies into the Ethernet standard," said Larry Genovesi, CEO of Ammasso. "In addition to being fully standard compatible, our adapter includes patent pending technology within the areas of Connection Management and Direct Data Placement. We feel this gives us unique advantages in terms of performance and capacity. As network traffic is driven by more applications talking to applications, the need for efficient server-to-server networking is becoming critical, and the Ammasso 1100 fulfills that need today." The Ammasso 1100 adapter will be generally available in June 2004 and can be purchased by contacting Ammasso directly either through www.ammasso.com or by calling 617-532-8100.