Agilent Technologies and RedSwitch to Team On InfiniBand Development.Business Editors/High-tech Writers PALO ALTO Palo Alto, city, California Palo Alto (păl`ō ăl`tō), city (1990 pop. 55,900), Santa Clara co., W Calif.; inc. 1894. Although primarily residential, Palo Alto has aerospace, electronics, and advanced research industries. and MILPITAS, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 1, 2000 Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE NYSE See: New York Stock Exchange :A) and RedSwitch Inc. today announced a joint development effort aimed at the emerging InfiniBand market with the goal of providing customers best-in-class networking solutions. RedSwitch will contribute world-class expertise in high-speed switch fabric design and switch management. Agilent brings high-speed I/O (Input/Output) The transfer of data between the CPU and a peripheral device. Every transfer is an output from one device and an input to another. See PC input/output. I/O - Input/Output design expertise, system-level integration capabilities, and ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) Pronounced "a-sick." A chip that is custom designed for a specific application rather than a general-purpose chip such as a microprocessor. design and manufacturing skills to the development effort. The companies plan to develop a wide range of ICs for a variety of InfiniBand applications. The agreement also includes an equity investment in RedSwitch by Agilent, the terms of which were not disclosed. InfiniBand is an interconnect or I/O architecture that connects servers with remote storage and networking devices and other servers. It can also be used inside servers for inter-processor communication. InfiniBand is a channel-based, switched fabric, point-to-point interconnect, which provides functionality, scalability and performance for a wide range of platforms and price performance points. Industry leaders Compaq, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM (International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY, www.ibm.com) The world's largest computer company. IBM's product lines include the S/390 mainframes (zSeries), AS/400 midrange business systems (iSeries), RS/6000 workstations and servers (pSeries), Intel-based servers (xSeries) , Intel, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems are driving the standard. Agilent recently announced plans to provide a range of semiconductor and board solutions in support of the standard, including router and switch products, serializer/deserializer (SerDes) ICs, and fiber-optic components. The company also plans to offer test solutions at both the protocol and physical layer levels. Agilent's first products for InfiniBand are expected in 2001. "The agreement with RedSwitch clearly shows our level of commitment in providing our customers with best-in-class networking solutions," said Bill Sullivan, senior vice president and general manager of Agilent's Semiconductor Products Group. "RedSwitch's talent, design experience, and IP will complement Agilent's broad competencies in this area." "We are very pleased to be teaming with an acknowledged industry leader in what we see as a very important technology," said Wen Li, president and CEO (1) (Chief Executive Officer) The highest individual in command of an organization. Typically the president of the company, the CEO reports to the Chairman of the Board. of RedSwitch. "The combination of our companies' expertise will allow us to quickly produce leading-edge products for the InfiniBand marketplace." About RedSwitch Inc. RedSwitch was recently incorporated, with headquarters in Milpitas, Calif. The company was formed by a design group from HAL Computer Systems HAL Computer Systems was a Campbell, CA-based computer manufacturer. It was started in 1990 by Andrew Heller, a principal designer of the original IBM POWER architecture. His idea was to build computers based on a RISC architecture for the commercial market. (a wholly owned subsidiary Wholly Owned Subsidiary A subsidiary whose parent company owns 100% of its common stock. Notes: In other words, the parent company owns the company outright and there are no minority owners. of Fujitsu Ltd.) with the support of HAL Hal: see Halle, Belgium. hal In Sufism, a state of mind reached from time to time by mystics during their journey toward God. The ahwal (plural of hal) are God-given graces that appear when a soul is purified of its attachments to the material world. . The group has broad switch design experience, having designed the Synfinity packet based switches for Fujitsu. The company is focused on developing InfiniBand standard switches and proprietary switches for selected customers. Information about RedSwitch can be found on the Web at www.redswitch.com. About Agilent Technologies Inc. Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE:A) is a diversified technology company, resulting from Hewlett-Packard Company's plan to strategically realign re·a·lign tr.v. re·a·ligned, re·a·lign·ing, re·a·ligns 1. To put back into proper order or alignment. 2. To make new groupings of or working arrangements between. itself into two fully independent companies. With approximately 43,000 employees serving customers in more than 120 countries, Agilent Technologies is a global leader in designing and manufacturing test, measurement and monitoring instruments, systems and solutions, and semiconductor and optical components. The company serves markets that include communications, electronics, life sciences and healthcare. In fiscal year 1999, the businesses comprising Agilent, then a subsidiary of HP, had net revenue of more than $8.3 billion. Information about Agilent Technologies can be found on the Web at www.agilent.com. |
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