Peer-To-Peer:

Lane15 Announces General Availability of Lane15 Fabric Mgr

Lane15 Software announced general availability of Lane15 Fabric Manager, Red River Edition, the industry's first commercial application of management software for InfiniBand hardware and software product developers and researchers. InfiniBand Architecture promises to help companies in data-intensive industries remove the bandwidth bottlenecks that have severely limited the performance of corporate data centers. Before InfiniBand network components can be deployed in data centers, they must first be developed and tested using fabric management software.

InfiniBand product companies that are currently either evaluating or have purchased the Lane15 Fabric Manager include Banderacom, BMC Software, Crossroads Systems, Essential Communications, IBM, InfiniCon Systems, InfiniSwitch, OmegaBand, Prisa Networks and Qlogic, among others. Lane15 has applied its architectural focus to deliver a stable, high availability foundation these companies require for developing and testing their InfiniBand products. Using the Lane15 Fabric Manager, InfiniBand hardware and software companies will realize a number of benefits, including reduced time-to-market, lower development costs and ensured interoperability.

"Management software is key to the development of the InfiniBand technology market," said Alisa Nessler, president and CEO of Lane15 Software. "By focusing on architecture as the key to strong management software, we offer the best product to InfiniBand network infrastructure companies. As InfiniBand technology emerges as the dominant network architecture for data centers, our extensible, modular approach meets the specifications defined today by the InfiniBand Trade Association and will accommodate future changes."

"Without management software, systems run blind. The importance of having the Fabric Manager for InfiniBand platforms is a big step towards long-term recognition and acceptance in the IT environment. Reaching the 'general availability' status is a milestone for the industry," said Vernon Turner, group vice president, IDC.

The Lane15 Fabric Manager architecture features a pluggable, modular foundation that provides extensibility and flexibility to easily support additional network features. Lane15 Fabric Manager provides broad interoperability and portability across a wide range of devices and operating systems.

Lane15 Fabric Manager supports all network management functions from initialization to monitoring to maintenance. Lane15's intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) allows users to view many of the manager's functions including automatic sub-node discovery, automatic traffic routing, regular sweeps to detect status changes, and collection and analysis of performance data. The Lane15 Fabric Manager supports remote administration, alerts, report generation, log files, and online help. The intuitive GUI can either display a graphical or text topology of the network. Some of the functions that can be controlled through the GUI are: locating nodes by node type, creating logical groups of nodes for easy monitoring, and troubleshooting failure points.

"We are impressed with the stability of the Lane15 Fabric Manager," said Ted Chen, executive vice president for Prisa Networks. "It is clear Lane15 made the architecture of the fabric manager their first priority. We are very pleased that they worked to bring to market a design that InfiniBand vendors need today."

"Lane15's Fabric Manager promises to provide the reliable, flexible and scalable foundation that next generation data centers will require to exploit the benefits of InfiniBand-based technologies," said Todd Matters, chief technology officer of InfiniCon Systems. "As data center managers test and deploy their InfiniBand implementations they will benefit from the fabric management provided by Lane15."

About InfiniBand

Architecture InfiniBand technology promises to bring increased computing capabilities and manageability to high demand data center and computing systems. InfiniBand Architecture is a new channel-based, switched fabric technology designed to solve the input/output (I/O) bottleneck that slows down data transfers between servers and peripherals in corporate data centers. InfiniBand Architecture benefits a wide range of industry participants from components vendors and systems suppliers to storage and networking communications firms. Ultimately, network administrators and the network users receive the greatest benefit through improved price/performance, greater flexibility and scalability, and more reliable and manageable data centers.

The specification for InfiniBand Architecture is being developed by the InfiniBand Trade Association, www.infinibandta.org, an independent industry body led by Compaq, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems. The IBTA is dedicated to meeting the demand for balanced system architecture with equally good performance in the memory, processor and I/O subsystems.

About Lane15 Software

Lane15 Software, headquartered in Austin, Texas, is a leading provider of software that manages the new InfiniBand Architecture for corporate networks. Lane15's products are designed to help companies in data-intensive industries remove the bandwidth bottlenecks that have severely limited the performance of data centers. The private corporation includes among its investors and strategic partners Austin Ventures, AV Labs, Compaq Computer Corp, Dell Ventures, Intel Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Lane15 is an active member of the InfiniBand Trade Association and participates in the association's Management Working Group, Marketing Working Group and its Compliance and Interoperability Working Group. For additional information about Lane15, visit www.lane15.com.

Contact Lane15 Software, Patricia Friar, 512-233-1515 x145, pfriar@lane15.com.