Agilent and Adaptec Partner to Deliver Fibre Channel for NT - Company Business and Marketing

ENT, Feb 23, 2000

Agilent Technologies Inc. and Adaptec Inc. will co-develop, market, and sell Fibre Channel host bus adapters for Windows NT-based servers. The alliance is directed toward increasing interoperability and support for Fibre Channel in Windows NT markets.

Under the terms of the agreement, Adaptec (www.adaptec.com) will license Agilent's (www.agilent.com) Fibre Channel host adapter and software driver technology.

Both companies will develop and market software solutions based on Agilent's Tachyon architecture, which will focus on interoperability and ease of use. Adaptec will focus its sales and distribution to market Fibre Channel solutions to PC OEMs and distributors.

Products sold through Adaptec will be cobranded.

Cobranded products based on Agilent's Tachyon architecture let servers use Fibre Channel to communicate with storage devices such as tape drives, RAID arrays, and storage clusters. Fibre Channel provides bandwidth up to 2 Gbps, making large data file transfers easier.

The partnership comes only weeks after Adaptec began marketing their Ultra 160 SCSI solutions.

The new SCSI solutions can perform twice as fast as Ultra 2 SCSI and are capable of handling the faster I/O required for today's servers and desktop machines.