FREMONT, CALIFORNIA, USA (April 6, 1999) - ZNYX Corporation, a pioneer in providing high availability networking solutions for Embedded and Telephony applications, today announced the release of its Sun Solaris® drivers for the company’s NetBlaster™ CompactPCI and PCI multi-channel Fast Ethernet adapter product lines. The drivers support Solaris version 2.6 for both SPARC™ and Intel® Pentium® processor - based platforms . Embedded in the drivers is ZNYX’s RAINlink™ technology that provides redundant links with fast failover, system-to-switch, and system-to-system trunking.

RAINlink provides fast deterministic failover by placing the secondary Ethernet channel in a hot standby state. When a failure is detected on the primary port, RAINlink redirects traffic to the secondary port that has already been initialized with the primary port’s MAC address. The failover sequence occurs within milliseconds. Internet Protocol connections are maintained during the failover transition. Both port-to-port and board-to-board failover mechanisms are supported. RAINlink’s system-to-switch trunking can be used to connect to Cisco® Fast EtherChannel compatible switches. The trunking capability can provide incremental scalability between 100 and 400 Mbps. System-to-system trunking provides the same capability by providing a multi-channel trunk between two Solaris platforms.

"With the inclusion of embedded RAINlink in our Solaris driver, ZNYX is providing scaleable and reliable networking capability for a number of applications including firewalls, web servers, Voice over IP, and messaging," said Tim Hayes, Product Marketing Manager at ZNYX Corporation. "RAINlink provides both system-to-switch and system-to-system trunking with redundancy. This technology addresses both client-server and distributed computing architectures."

"RAINlink for Solaris provides a reliable, high performance link. With Architek’s FelisHA high availability management application, we use these capabilities to improve our high availability firewall. RAINlink removes Ethernet as a single point of failure and gives us a reliable heartbeat. Together they provide a global solution from port failover to application/system failover." said Simon Walmsley, Marketing Director for Architek Corporation. "Using RAINlink we can offer both Customer Premises and Central Office clusters on PCI and CompactPCI Solaris platforms."

NetBlaster adapters are available for both PCI and CompactPCI systems. NetBlaster CompactPCI is available in two, four, and eight channel models supporting 3U and 6U slots, Hot Swap and front or rear panel I/O. Prices for the NetBlaster CompactPCI series range from $699 to $2699. The NetBlaster PCI series support one, two, and four channel models. Pricing ranges from $99 to $699. Additional product information including drivers for the NetBlaster adapters, are available from ZNYX’s website.

ZNYX Corporation, a privately held company headquartered in Fremont, California specializes in bringing continuous availability and improved performance to network systems, while preserving the existing network infrastructure. ZNYX’s focus is to deliver innovative, cost-effective solutions for high availability computing systems to make network interfaces faster and more reliable. Using its Redundant Array of Independent Netports™ (RAIN) technology, ZNYX designs and manufactures a family of PCI and CompactPCI Fast Ethernet adapters. Information about ZNYX products is available at http://www.znyx.com.

ARCHITEK, a privately held company headquartered in Milano, Italy. In addition to Internet/networking systems expertise, Architek specializes in high availability solutions with FelisHA for client/server applications, and FelisHFW a specific implementation for firewalls based on Hot High Availability technology. The FelisHA product line is currently supported on Solaris & Windows/NT. For more information contact Celia Abernethy (celia@mercaritek.it) or (FelisHA@unirel.it).