tec.News - Harting

NGIO architecture (Fig. NGIO Forum)
NGIO will probably reach the market
by the end of the year 2000,
while for Future I/O, the market
launch is planned in 2001. The advocates
of Future I/O – incidentally,
the same group as is promoting
the launch of PCI-X – expect that
PCI-X can meet market requirements
for another year or so before
a successor has to be ready.
During this time the Future I/O
specifications will be worked out
in detail.
The competition between the two
development standards will lead
to a wide selection of products,
support services, development
tools and new applications. For
existing mainstream applications,
such as embedded systems or telecommunications,
it is additionally
planned to integrate the new I/O
architectures into existing systems,
such as VMEbus and CompactPCI.
The lifetime of the successful
parallel bus systems can
thus be extended, while simultaneously
expanding the network
by scaling from computer to computer.
The initiatives, which aim to create
faster I/O structures are, however,
bringing a completely new
group of suppliers onto the scene.
Companies such as Cisco, Ascend
and 3Com, which offer hubs and
routers for IP applications, have
successfully entered the mainstream
market in a very short
space of time and are now preparing
to compete with the switches
from Lucent, Nortel, Alcatel and
Siemens. Another attack on the
established market players may
come with a totally new – standardised
and scaleable – I/O interface.
For the future SAN market
it will be a completely new game.
Representatives of both I/O
groups are having discussions in
an attempt to overcome political
points of disagreement before the
competing standards split the
market. One matter of dispute is
whether the NGIO group is specifying
the peripheral communication
in the SAN in too much detail
and therefore possibly limiting
competition. On the other hand,
Future I/O plans to set specific
standardisation levels for communication
from ASIC to ASIC, PCB to
PCB and server to server. Initial
promises on the part of Future I/O
tended towards limited specifications
so as to permit reasonable
competition. However, many developers
consider that the standardisation
levels now planned intrude
their differentiation domains.
Users are well advised to look very
carefully at how the industry once
again makes a decisive advance in
terms of speed, I/O capacity and
interconnectivity. What is coming
next? Will the technology spiral
continue to turn at the same
pace? Can permanent increases
in performance combined with
reduced space requirement still
be achieved in the future? Whatever
direction developments take,
HARTING is equipped to support its
customers with tailor-made connection
technologies.
DAVID K. ROBAK is "Director of
Marketing, Electronic Products" at
HARTING INC. OF NORTH AMERICA in
Elgin, Illinois, USA.
Info-Fax 4007
33
People Power Partnership