Performance Technologies announces fastest ULTRA SCSI for SBUS dramatically increases performance of Sun workstations

Business Wire, June 20, 1996

ROCHESTER, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 20, 1996--Performance Technologies, Inc. (PTI) today announced its Intelligent ULTRA SCSI Adapter, which dramatically increases the performance, reliability and disk throughput of Sun workstations.

The PT-SBS450 for SBus is the fastest adapter in the industry, offering up to 40 Mbps SCSI performance in the ULTRA/Wide/FAST mode. It is the only ULTRA SCSI that supports workstations running either Solaris 2.x or SunOS 4.1.x.

"The Intelligent PT-SBS450 offers customers unique capabilities not found on any other product in the market," said Hank Heneghan, PTI product manager. "Our industry-leading implementation is based on PTI's background and expertise in supplying more than six generations of SCSI Host Adapter products."

The PT-SBS450 is the first ULTRA SCSI Adapter available for the Sun market. PTI was also the first copany to introduce a Fast/Narrow SCSI controller for the SBus (1991) and the first company to introduce a Wide/Fast SCSI controller (1993) for Sun workstations.

Unique Hardware and Software Implementations

The PT-SBS450 is built on a unique hardware architecture that includes a high-speed imbedded RISC processor to supervise operations and minimize the overhead imposed on the Sun platforms. In addition, an embedded processor-based ULTRA SCSI controller provides optimum SCSIbus operation.

This dual processor design dramatically reduces interrupt latency from an average of four or five interrupts for a typical SCSI adapter to one interrupt during PT-SBS450 ULTRA SCSI transfer.

The SCSIbus support software supplied with Intelligent ULTRA SCSI includes PTI's unique Adaptive Synchronous Negotiation (ASN) feature. ASN, in normal operation, will sustain the highest possible transfer rate -- up to 40 Mbps -- with an ULTRA SCSI disk. If necessary, the intelligence in the driver uses various statistical techniques to interactively maintain the highest possible rates on an incremental basis.

Investment Protection

PTI protects the investments its SBus customers have made in earlier SCSI devices by providing full backward compatibility to 16-bit Wide/FAST devices, allowing them to be interconnected on the same SCSIbus.

"Compatibility and investment protection are of primary concerns to our SBus customers," Brind said. "By providing backward compatibility, customers can be assure of complete interoperability when connecting to a wide variety of SCSI devices."

Pricing and Availability

The Intelligent ULTRA SCSI Adapter for SBus (PT-SBS450) family of products is available with single-ended or differential SCSIbus interface. Optional versions allowing internal connection are also available. Both configurations are available immediately. The single-ended version costs $1,095. The differential version costs $1,145.

Performance Technologies, Inc., headquartered in Rochester, New York, designs, manufactures and markets a wide variety of fault-tolerant, high-performance communications, networking and data storage interface systems products. The company's products are targeted towards high-performance, mission-critical networking solutions typically used in applications that include telecommunications, financial services, defense and public safety. Performance Technologies, Inc. is pubicly traded on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange under the symbol "PTIX." -0-

Note to Editors: SBus, Solaris and SunOS are trademarks of Sun Microsystems.

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