Bay Microsystems expands ABEx product family

JUNE 21, 2007 -- Network processor company Bay Microsystems Inc. (search for Bay Microsystems) has announced the ABEx40XX, the newest members of its ABEx (Agile Bandwidth Exchange) family of Global Virtualization platforms designed to address the growing needs of global enterprise customers.

According to the company, these advanced platforms are designed to link disparate data and computer centers for customers in the web portal, financial, entertainment, scientific, medical, government, and research market segments that need fast and reliable global access to high-value data. Enabled by Bay's Infiniband Routing over wide area networks, the ABEx family provides virtualized connectivity to distributed storage and computing resources and supports a multitude of interfaces, including Infiniband for Data Center connectivity and Ethernet, IP/MPLS, SONET/SDH, and ATM for connection over a wide area network. 

The new ABEx40XX platforms incorporate a compact design with the highest available capacity for switching, aggregation, and bandwidth management. Based on its newest network processor, Chesapeake, the ABEx40XX family delivers up to 40 Gbits of capacity in a single slot. The family supports both single slot and multi-slot configurations, say company representatives.  

"Commercial enterprises, research centers, and public agencies face the ongoing challenge of accessing a growing number of remote data centers, compute resources, and storage farms," explains Gerry Jankauskas, chief technical officer for Bay Microsystems. "From an overall computing experience, network users desire to work locally and connect globally. The unique low-latency, high-performance processing, protocol support, and interface options delivered in the ABEx platform provides an unprecedented solution for accessing these islands of high-value data efficiently and securely over great distances; one not addressed by any other system vendor today," he notes.

"The rapid adoption of high-performance InfiniBand interconnect for server and storage clusters has exposed bottlenecks in the links connecting distant data centers," adds Thad Omura, vice president of product marketing for Mellanox Technologies. "Bay's ABEx platform opens this bottleneck and provides a seamless, long distance InfiniBand connection for today's private and public high-value data center operators."

In recent network deployments, Bay says its ABEx platform has enabled vast amounts of secure and reliable transfers of massive databases over distances of thousands of kilometers. Recently, the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory announced the transmission of over 60 Terabytes of InfiniBand data across a distance of 4,500 km in only 32 hours utilizing the ABEx platform.  This is believed to be the largest amount of Infiniband data ever transferred per unit time over a wide area network, contends the company.

The initial version is slated for general availability in the second half of calendar year 2007.

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