By William Fellows
GigaNet Inc, the Concord, Massachusetts-based supplier of high- speed interconnects says its Clan (cluster LAN) technology is not tied exclusively to Intel Corp processors, nor to Microsoft Corp Windows NT, and that it expects to support other instruction sets and operating systems over time. The company is guarded about providing any details in case the attention is deflected from its current focus on the Windows 2000 products that it hopes will kick-start its revenue stream. However there’s plenty of opportunity to do business according to CEO David Follett, who says that once all of the marketing rhetoric is set aside, very few vendors have actually shipped any systems connected using such links. Yesterday GigaNet went down the road already trodden by Compaq Computer Corp and its rival ServerNet interconnect (CI No 3,552), by announcing that it will also support the Microsoft Windows Socket Direct Path, an API that Microsoft will ship with Windows 2000 (aka NT 5) enabling systems to send and receive data without going through the operating systems’ TCP/IP stack. The first cut of the API will link WinSock to interconnects supporting the Intel-oriented Virtual Interface Architecture. ServerNet, Clan and others support VIA though GigaNet claims its native implementation of VIA in PCI cards makes it twenty times as fast as ServerNet and three times as fast as the Dolphin Interconnect Solutions’ technology. The API will ship in a Windows 2000 beta next quarter. Users will be able to cluster multiple NT systems together in SAN system area networks using VIA’s high-speed, low latency connection. GigaNet is poised to name its first significant OEM for Clan next Tuesday, according to Follet. Computergram readers would be little surprised if the company bags IBM Corp. Big Blue has been widely demo’ing GigaNet- based server solutions for some time now.
