Giganet Announces VI Over Ethernet Products.

Giganet, Inc. recently announced VI/IP, the industry's first Virtual Interface (VI) Architecture-based networking over standard Ethernet. By combining the high throughput and low overhead of VI with the standard infrastructure of today's IP networks, VI/IP can double application throughput while reducing up to one fifth the computing resources needed to deliver data in environments such as NAS. By implementing VI, applications can communicate with each other directly, bypassing the operating system and protocol stacks. VI's inherent capabilities have been extended with a patent pending architecture called RapidFlow. RapidFlow improves network performance by reducing network congestion. The VI/IP products extend VI by implementing the capabilities of Giganet's VI over a standard Ethernet network. To speed the development of optimized VI/IP products for network storage environments, Giganet has entered into a joint development relationship with Network Appliance.

Mark Santora, senior vice president of marketing at Network Appliance said, "Giganet's experience in implementing VI networking protocols into hardware is integral to Network Appliance's s strategy of supporting open storage networking standards, developing future high-performance protocol prosposals like Direct Access File Systmes (DAFS) and leveraging VI over Ethernet."

The initial VI/IP product will be a 1 Gb Ethernet host adapter card with availability expected early next year.