STORAGE

Xframe Featured in Live Demonstrations with Cisco Switch, HP Servers and Lawrence Livermore National Labs Network -- S2io, Inc., an emerging leader in high-speed server and storage I/O solutions, announced that the company's newest product, Xframe(TM), set a new performance record of 7.3 Gigabits/sec for single-card, high-speed data connectivity at the 2003 Supercomputing Conference in Phoenix. The live 10 Gigabit Ethernet network demonstration is a joint initiative by S2io, Cisco Systems, and Hewlett-Packard and features S2io's Xframe 10 Gigabit Ethernet Server/Storage Adapter, Cisco's Catalyst 6500 switch and HP's Itanium servers running the Linux 2.6 kernel. The companies have been working closely to provide the infrastructure necessary to support 10 Gigabit Ethernet from the network core through to the data center and in scientific and research applications. "SC 2003 is an ideal venue to demonstrate the breakthrough performance of Xframe," noted Dave Zabrowski, S2io's President and CEO. "By combining high-performance I/O with the cost benefits of an Ethernet standard, 10GbE delivers unparalleled value for lead users in intensive computing, scientific applications and Fortune 1000 data centers." National labs and university computing centers are continually pushing the envelope of processing performance as they focus on projects ranging from climatology and genome mapping to weapons simulation and 3-dimensional modeling. This work generates enormous amounts of data that must be easily accessed, backed up, stored and often shared over long distances. 10 Gigabit Ethernet is recognized as an ideal standards-based connectivity solution where large datasets need to be moved very quickly. "At SC2003's Bandwidth Challenge, Lawrence Livermore Lab is demonstrating a 16-node computing cluster that connects to a complex Network Attached Storage sub-system with a Fiber Channel-based back-end," said Dave Wiltzius, Network Division Leader at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. "To date, the Lab needed to use multi-1 Gigabit Ethernet pipes to connect these two types of subsystems. However, we are finding that 10 Gigabit Ethernet is delivering the performance we need to solve this problem." Leading server, storage and switching OEMs are concluding successful validation testing with Xframe. Pricing and delivery information are now available to OEMs and a development kit is being offered to enable pilot programs.