<font size=-1>NGIO FORUM ANNOUNCES RELEASE OF 1.0 SPECIFICATION</font>
Delivery of Specification Culminates Two-year Effort as Members Predict First Products in 2000 The Next Generation I/O (
NGIO) Forum has announced the immediate release of the NGIO 1.0 specification (see
I/O, I/O IT’s Off To The Future We Go in HP Professional, July 99), which is a comprehensive blueprint ready for developers designing products for high-performance systems. The specification details the architectural requirements for implementing each of the elements of an end-to-end solution, including Host Channel Adapters (HCA), physical links, switches, Target Channel Adapters (TCA), fabric services and software infrastructure.
“The rapid growth of the Internet-based economy means that servers in the corporate data center must dramatically improve performance, reliability and scalability to keep pace with user demands,” said Charles Andres, NGIO Marketing Working Group Chairman and Group Manager, I/O Technologies, Market Development Engineering, Sun Microsystems. “The availability of the NGIO specification for a switched-fabric channel architecture permits hardware, software and operating system vendors to begin immediately developing products that will dramatically improve servers and related systems, instead of waiting a year or longer for alternative schemes.”
The specification, in development for more than two years by members of the Forum, provides the framework for implementation of the NGIO architecture for development tools and services, silicon, peripherals and systems. The NGIO architecture builds upon existing storage and networking I/O standards and protocols, providing a new physical point-to-point architecture for servers and devices connected to them.