Engenio 4-Gigabit Fibre Channel SAN technology featured in Supercomputing 2004 demo.

Engenio Information Technologies, Inc., a provider of innovative and highly scalable modular storage systems for the open enterprise, has announced that the company's 4-Gigabit Fibre Channel Storage Area Network (SAN) technology will be demonstrated at SuperComputing 2004, the premier conference on high-performance computing, networking and storage. The conference is being held at the David Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh, Pa., from November 6-12, 2004.

The demonstration features Silicon Graphics servers, LSI Logic host bus adapters and Brocade switches that show 4Gbps Fibre Channel technology is ready to move from test labs to the data center. The technology will enable customers that require the highest levels of bandwidth performance to reduce the number of connections between their storage systems and computers, increasing throughput, improving RAS (reliability, availability, and scalability), and lowering total cost of ownership.

"Fibre Channel technology at 4Gbps is very important to high-performance computing users and Engenio will be an early provider," said Steve Gardner, Engenio Director of Product Marketing. "High-performance computing users have an insatiable demand for speed, and Engenio and Silicon Graphics have been long-time suppliers to this industry segment. With 4 Gbps Fibre Channel, we are taking the lead to provide this new technology to the marketplace."

Leading industry researchers expect 4 Gbps Fibre Channel technology to emerge as the leading SAN technology for data storage systems within the next two years and high-performance computing customers are expected to be early adopters of the technology. The new technology is cost effective and provides for backward compatibility to 2-Gigabit and 1-Gigabit Fibre Channel investments. 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 the today's 2Gbps speeds. Faster data transfers can reduce processing times and increase the productivity of analytical workers.

"The market is developing for 4-Gigabit Fibre Channel technology," said Randy Kerns, senior partner, Evaluator Group. "A number of companies have been talking about getting into this space for the past year but Engenio is the first to make it happen for storage systems. Their commitment to provide solutions for customers who require high levels of throughput and performance is demonstrated with their 4-Gigabit delivery."

Founded in 1988, the Supercomputing conference is attended by scientists, researchers, software developers, policy makers, corporate managers, CIOs and IT administrators from universities, industry and government. This year's theme is "Bridging Communities" and is intended to demonstrate how high performance computing, networking and storage are critical to all scientific disciplines.

Supercomputers assist professionals in the development of models to solve previously unsolvable problems in areas such as biotechnology, weather research, astronomy, drug research, and wearable sensors. Supercomputers also help solve existing problems in areas such as seismic processing and crash simulations.