NetEffect Rolls 10-Gigabit Ethernet Adaptors

PITTSBURGH — NetEffect, resurrected from its earlier dabbling in Inifiniband products, has switched gears and introduced its first family of 10-Gigabit Ethernet channel adapters at the SC2004 conference here. The first adapters are two ASICs on an adaptor board.

NetEffect (Austin, Texas) was founded in 1999 as Banderacom Inc., a provider of InfiniBand chips. In the three-year downturn the new fabric was not supported by mainstream data centers. This year, Banderacom reemerged as NetEffect with a new focus on data center networking traffic.

The adaptors implement iWARP Ethernet standards, delivering up to 10Gbit/s data rates and concurrent access to networking, storage and clustering connectivity over existing Ethernet infrastructures. iWARP is a series of extensions to Ethernet and TCP/IP and is intended to eliminate the overhead that Ethernet carries with it.

"iWARP will virtually eliminate the overhead required to process networking traffic and enable broad deployment of 10-Gigabit Ethernet in the data center," said president and CEO Rick Maule.

NetEffect's virtual pipeline architecture supports multiple bidirectional 10 Gbit/s ports with minimum latency by configuring buffer activity and the I/O commands to bypass the context switch. In addition, the ECA can operate in a dual-port configurations for 10 Gbit/1Gbit Ethernet applications."The dual-port capability and the latency efficiency across the OS, kernel and device driver gives our solution the edge over our competitors", said John Hageman, vice president marketing and business development.

The NetEffect NE01 product family will be generally available in first quarter of 2005, with pricing beginning at $1,195.