New SCSI Standard Will Allow Sans Over Generic Networks.

SLINGER, Wis.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 27, 1999--

ANSI T10 Working Group Agrees to Develop SCSI over ST Standard

GENROCO, Inc. (GENROCO) (OTC Bulletin Board: "GRCI") announced that the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) T10 Working Group has agreed to draft a standard for the Small Computer Systems Interface (SCSI) carried over Schedule Transfer (ST). This methodology will ultimately define the most flexible and efficient commodity storage protocol allowing for connection independent, ultra-high performance Storage Area Networks (SANs).

GENROCO, sponsor of the SCSI over ST (SST) proposal for the new draft standard, was joined by company representatives from Adaptec, Brocade, Compaq, Emulex, Fujitsu, Hewlett Packard, IBM, LSI Logic, Seagate, StorageTek, Sun Microsystems, UNISYS, and others in approving the measure.

Since it became an official industry standard in 1986, SCSI has devolved to keep up with growing I/O demands for a wide variety of systems. While consisting primarily of rules determining the format and transmission of storage data, SCSI recognizes virtually every type of peripheral and has continually increased transfer speeds and widened data paths keeping pace with leading edge requirements. Fibre Channel, the backbone of current SAN technology, employs the SCSI command set.

ST is a new ANSI standard network protocol designed by the T11.1 Task Group to allow many times higher bandwidth with much lower host platform overhead than TCP/IP or any other current industry convention. GENROCO was joined by IBM, Compaq, SGI, ODS Networks, Power Micro Research, Los Alamos National Laboratories, CERN, and other organizations in developing the ST specification which allows for transparent memory-to-memory transfers.

An ST data movement over any type of network commences, or is "scheduled," only when a ready transmit buffer is matched by an equal sized, ready receive buffer at the destination. This allows the sending and receiving engines at endpoints of a network to operate at the highest possible speed and efficiency by eliminating buffer overruns and underruns without operating system intervention or overhead. Other protocols, such as SCSI, IP, and VIA, can be encapsulated within ST.

"The strength of SCSI is its ability to transport data efficiently, said Dal Allen, President of ENDL, Inc. and member of the T10 Board of Directors. "Porting SCSI over Scheduled Transfer is an ideal combination, which will allow vendors to introduce platform-independent and network-independent SAN solutions for large scale systems."

GENROCO specializes in developing I/O solutions for users of high performance SANs and video servers, and has developed a family of switches, routers and host bus adapters that are designed to utilize ST. These products are being sold into a variety of

applications oriented around very large system and peripheral clusters with backbone speeds of gigabytes per second among a number of industry standard communication fabrics such as Gigabit Ethernet and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM).

The Company demonstrated a network independent SAN using its SST storage array and ST network router at the University of New Mexico last month. GENROCO's proprietary expertise allows end-users to seamlessly link platforms sold by any of the major vendors, and build heterogeneous LANs and WANs capable of connecting thousands of individual workstations to petabytes of data storage without intermediate servers.

"The progressive evolution of ST standards is helping to drive GENROCO's high performance networking and storage product families," stated Don Woelz, Vice-President of Marketing for GENROCO, T11.1 Vice-Chairman, and editor of the SST proposal. "Our ST bridging technology continues to extend storage and networking performance boundaries and could ultimately be the foundation for everything from next generation Internet to HDTV on demand services."

A copy of the SST proposal can be found on the world wide web at: ftp://ftp.t10.org/t10/document.99/99-276r0.pdf

About GENROCO

GENROCO, Inc. is a 25 year old, publicly traded engineering and marketing company that specializes in providing enabling technology for users of high performance SANs. By developing cross-platform support for its patented offerings, the Company is able to deliver unique, extraordinarily high bandwidth, low host overhead products for these markets. GENROCO enjoys a global customer base that includes Compaq, Fujitsu, SGI, Sun, the US Departments of Defense and Energy, CERN, and other research institutions.

Additional information about GENROCO can be found at: http://www.genroco.com/

SOURCE: DigitalWork ( http://www.digitalwork.com )

WHERE SMALL BUSINESS GOES TO WORK