DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /    ( Table of Contents )

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PRECISION I/O LOOKS TO ELIMINATE 'SERVER I/O BOTTLENECK'

Precision I/O Inc, has raised $10 million in venture funding to bring to market a new high-performance server I/O architecture based on Ethernet, the foundation technology of today's ubiquitous IP networks. The company's products, to be introduced beginning in mid-2004, will open up the server-to- network bottleneck that has plagued enterprises in their efforts to bring the benefits of high-speed networking to data-center and high- performance computing applications.

Lead investors in the company's first round of venture funding are Advanced Technology Ventures (ATV) (Palo Alto, Calif.); 3i (Menlo Park, Calif.); and Foundation Capital (Menlo Park). Precision I/O was spun out in March 2003 from Packet Design, LLC, which provided seed funding.

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Judy Estrin, Precision I/O's chairman and acting CEO, said the company is the first to solve the server I/O problem using standard IP/Ethernet infrastructure. Previous approaches have been proprietary solutions or complex new switch fabric technologies (e.g., InfiniBand) that require users to deploy a costly secondary switch infrastructure and make significant software modifications.

Precision I/O products will be implemented initially as software solutions that support network speeds of up to 10 gigabits per second, and later as hardware/software solutions that support wire-rate processing of 10 Gbps. Products will be offered for Unix, Linux and Windows operating system environments. The company plans to sell its products chiefly through system integrators, value-added resellers and OEMs.

Server I/O Bottleneck Erases Gains In Network, Application Performance

"Organizations implementing new network computing architectures -- cluster or Grid computing, blade servers, network-attached storage (NAS) and the like -- have been frustrated by seeing the server-to-network bottleneck essentially cancel out potential gains in application and network performance," Estrin said. "Similarly, existing enterprise servers have run out of steam because they are wasting valuable CPU cycles on I/O that could be used to support more users or to accelerate business-critical applications. Customers face an endless upward cost spiral as they buy more and more servers to compensate.

"The industry has made several attempts to deal with this problem. TCP Offload Engine (TOE) solutions are based on standard Ethernet, but they mistakenly treat the protocol processing, instead of the operating system overhead, as the primary performance obstacle. InfiniBand involves a solution that bypasses the OS -- the key to achieving very low latency -- but forces users to implement a new network fabric side-by- side with their packet- switched IP networks; this adds untold cost and complexity, requiring new hardware and drivers as well as changes to applications. A third solution, remote direct memory access (RDMA), adds a whole new protocol that must be deployed at both ends of the wire to achieve any performance improvement at all."

High Throughput, Low Latency -- With No New Fabrics, Packet Formats Or Protocols

By addressing the way IP/Ethernet packets are processed on each server, rather than developing alternative protocols, Precision I/O offers the advantages of earlier solutions without their drawbacks. The company's newly developed patent-pending technology takes the networking function out of the path of the operating system, achieving high throughput, low latency and greatly improved CPU utilization -- all using the industry-standard high-volume, cost-effective Ethernet foundation.

Precision I/O products will require no new switch fabrics, packet formats or changes to the user's applications, and will operate on servers running any number of CPUs. Because it leverages the existing IP infrastructure, Precision I/O technology -- unlike InfiniBand or RDMA -- can be deployed at just one end of the "wire" (e.g., one server of a given pair) to effect dramatic performance gains at that end.