StarGen Launches Industry First ASI Software Suite; Robust Development Tools Expose the Power of Advanced Switching Interconnect to Enable Rapid Application Deployment

Business Wire, August 23, 2005

SAN FRANCISCO -- StarGen, the leading developer of Advanced Switching Interconnect (ASI) solutions announced details of its AXSys ASI Software Suite, a highly integrated family of application software and development tools for Advanced Switching Interconnect fabric networks. The AXSys ASI Software Suite will be packaged in several configurations, providing capabilities from simple fabric setup and evaluation, to advanced features implementation and custom application integration with ASI components.

The AXSys ASI Software Suite is the key to rapid time-to-market with ASI designs. The AXSys Software exposes the power of ASI technology through tools and proven modules that accelerate development efforts and mitigate project risk. The AXSys Software Suite is unique from many competitive approaches in that it is not delivered as simple reference code but as a tightly integrated and fully validated set of complementary modules ranging from fabric management services to data movement engines and advanced applications. OEMs utilizing the AXSys Software Suite are provided with a wide variety of software tools and applications that are designed from the start to work together. To aid in flexibility and ensure interoperability OEMs can choose to implement the modules in a building block manner in any fashion that best achieves the traditional engineering trade-off challenges of performance, efficiency, cost, and time to market.

The AXSys ASI Software Suite consists of:

The AXSysView GUI - Provides a visual representation of an ASI interconnect topology. AXSysView automatically discovers all ASI endpoints and detects PCIe endpoints, displays system topology and bindings, and reports on traffic statistics, such as error counts and packet throughput. The AXSysView GUI operates in native and remote modes to offer geographically remote configuration and monitoring of systems. It is the 'dashboard' for the system designer or user.

The ASI Fabric Management Suite - Provides discovery and enumeration of an ASI fabric. The ASI-SIG has defined a set of fabric management services and associated messaging protocols that provide a common framework for managing ASI devices. The AXSys Fabric Management Suite implements 100% of these services and is fully compliant with the messaging interface. In addition, the Fabric Management Suite provides a high level Fabric Maintenance Library API (FML-API), which is a set of system function calls that integrate into existing applications to provide Fabric Management functions such as discovery, enumeration, monitoring and reporting.

The ASI Driver Module - Designed for flexibility and multi-vendor endpoint discovery, this module provides low-level API's to manage device endpoints. The AXSys Driver module will include O/S specific bus drivers for Linux 2.6, Windows XP, Solaris and VxWorks. The ASI Bus Driver has a well-defined IOCTL based API which the ASI defined fabric management services use to access the device drivers and the ASI hardware components. The IOCTL API interface is available for OEM software system designers who choose not to use StarGen's ASI Fabric Management Suite FML-API. In addition, O/S Dependency Guidelines documentation is available to support porting to proprietary environments.

Dataplane Interface Modules - Legacy software compatibility is critical. To support easy integration with well defined customer applications a suite of data-plane application programming interfaces (API's) are available for integration into the AXSys Software Suite. The first release will address Internet Protocol over ASI (IPoASI) and Sockets Direct over ASI (SDoASI). Additional modules will be announced as further development is completed.

Advanced Services Components - To ensure support for advanced ASI features, the AXSys Software will support extensions for advanced features such as path redundancy, high availability support, SNMP and bandwidth reservation.

Diagram 1 "AXSYS ASI Software Environment Graphic" - NOTE TO EDITORS -High res mage will be available on the StarGen website at http://www.stargen.com/axsys

"In the past programmers had to first understand complex switch fabric devices, then write and debug thousands of lines of code to (1) Discover the topology, (2) Setup a route, and (3) Get statistics for the device. With the AXSys Software suite these complex steps are automatically performed by three simple API function calls with the right argument values," said Ibi Dhilla, Director of Software Development at StarGen. "Tools like the AXSys ASI Software Suite are fundamentally going to change the way engineers approach the complex task of fabric management and data movement."

Availability

The AXSys ASI Software Suite will begin field trials in October 2005 to select OEMs and StarGen partners. General availability is scheduled for Q1 2006.

The Fabric Management Library API and the Device Dependent Library specification will be published to ensure that all ASI compliant endpoints can leverage this powerful tool suite. This is scheduled for Q1 2006. Early development partners are adopting this framework now.