SYSTEMS

ACTON, MA, Paceline Systems Corporation, the leader in intelligent, enterprise-class InfiniBand fabric solutions, today announced the company has formed a strategic alliance with Mellanox Technologies, Ltd., the leading provider of InfiniBand technology semiconductors. Mellanox will supply InfiniBand silicon to Paceline and the companies will work together to develop new products and pursue joint marketing activities. Paceline recently announced its intelligent InfiniBand switch (the Paceline 4100) for enterprise data center and high performance computing environments. With this alliance, versions of Paceline’s switching products featuring Mellanox’s InfiniScaleTM silicon will be available starting in the first quarter of 2003. “Mellanox is the leading provider of semiconductors for InfiniBand solutions,” said Barry Kallander, Paceline president and CEO. “InfiniBand is being rapidly adopted in high volume database and high performance computing applications. Paceline is working closely with customers that include a Fortune 500 retailer, the University of Washington and Sandia National Laboratories to deploy InfiniBand fabrics based on the Paceline 4100 intelligent switch. Mellanox is the perfect partner to help us expand this market opportunity and develop new products.” “Paceline Systems has moved out in front with InfiniBand switching systems and fabric management software that combine high performance and ease of management, in a compact form factor,” said Eyal Waldman, president and CEO of Mellanox Technologies. “Our collaborative development efforts will allow Paceline to provide exceptional switches that will accelerate the market penetration of InfiniBand.” An eight port, 4x InfiniBand intelligent switch, the Paceline 4100 provides 160 Gbps non-blocking I/O bandwidth in a compact 1U form factor. The 4100 enables organizations to rapidly realize the groundbreaking performance advantages of InfiniBand, coupled with the industry-leading manageability, scalability and reliability of Paceline’s embedded Apex fabric management software. Apex provides advanced features that include resilient topology control, load balancing, non-disruptive software upgrades, configurable routing algorithms and integration with popular enterprise management systems. At less than $1,000 per intelligent switch port, the 4100 provides 8 times higher performance than Gigabit Ethernet switches, at a price point that falls below the cost of Fibre Channel switches. InfiniBand is an open, cost-effective I/O architecture developed by a consortium that includes the world’s largest computer companies. Using Paceline’s intelligent fabric switches and embedded Apex fabric management software, organizations can rapidly leverage InfiniBand’s ability to deliver as much as an 8 times increase in throughput over traditional Gigabit Ethernet and TCP/IP interconnects; a 90 percent reduction in latency; and the elimination of communications overhead that consumes as much as 50 percent of server CPU cycles. Paceline makes high-performance InfiniBand fabrics as easy to deploy and operate as an Ethernet network.