Banderacom Demos Channel Adapter

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Banderacom, a fabless InfiniBand semiconductor company, announced the storage and networking industry’s first technology demonstration of an InfiniBand-to-Fibre Channel Target Channel Adapter (TCA) prototype.

“This industry-first demonstration of an InfiniBand-to-Fibre Channel Target Channel Adapter (TCA) complements our existing solutions for InfiniBand-to-Ethernet and InfiniBand-to-TCP/IP offload systems, reinforcing Banderacom’s position as the leading provider of InfiniBand target silicon,” said Les Crudele, president and CEO of Banderacom.

QLogic announced in May that it chose Banderacom’s IBandit chips to power QLogic’s high performance InfiniBand SANblade connectivity solutions.

The prototype InfiniBand-to-Fibre Channel TCA is built with Banderacom’s high performance IBandit prototype chipset. It features InfiniBand-to-Fibre Channel software developed by QLogic and was developed in less than 45 days using Banderacom’s IBandit product development kit (PDK), which began shipping in February 2001.

The InfiniBand-to-Fibre Channel system is part of a larger demonstration that highlights three key elements of InfiniBand data centers: distributed storage, connectivity to Fibre Channel SANs, and connectivity to Ethernet local area networks (LANs).

In the demonstration, hosted at the InfiniBand Trade Association conference in Orlando, a host server fulfills requests from clients on the Ethernet LAN by retrieving data stored remotely on a Fibre Channel SAN. The host server, Ethernet LAN and Fibre Channel SAN are all connected through an InfiniBand fabric utilizing Banderacom’s IBandit-powered target channel adaptors (TCAs).

The demonstration is hosted on a single InfiniBand fabric made up of Intel and Banderacom host channel adapter (HCA) nodes, a 16-port QLogic InfiniBand switch and a variety of Target Channel Adaptor (TCA) nodes powered by Banderacom’s IBandit prototype chipset. Each IBandit node contains a Lane15 Subnet Management Agent (SMA), while other nodes use SMAs from Intel Corp.

The entire subnet is managed by a Lane15 Fabric Manager and monitored by a graphical management interface both locally in the Banderacom booth and remotely from the Lane15 Software booth. A CATC InfiniBand Protocol Analyzer graphically demonstrates the InfiniBand traffic generated by the demonstration.

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