2004-08-03

New Product Announcement

PacketEngine Network Management Software

Temecula, Calif. - Aug 03, 2004 AEI announces the release of PacketEngine Network Management Software supporting UNIX and Windows operating systems.

Enhancements include support for all popular manufacturers' Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet NICs, as well as LAN on motherboard ports.

"AEI is the first to offer a comprehensive network management suite for the UNIX operating environment," said Randy Silks, AEI's Chief Technology Officer. "PacketEngine is managed through an easy to use Graphical User's Interface, making configuration of one or more Failover or Trunk Groups a snap."

Designed for high-end server applications, PacketEngine provides Network Administrators:

Millisecond Port Failover

Trunking

Bandwidth Management

And other advanced server features.

Active/Active Port Failover
PacketEngine automatically detects network link failures on the server-side, and switches traffic over to an "ACTIVE" redundant link (part of a failover group) in a matter of milliseconds. Unlike conventional failover solutions, PacketEngine's millisecond failover eliminates the need to reconfigure the network protocol stack and the relearning process of layer 2 MAC addresses by clients to reestablish a network link after a failure. This sub-second failover provides transparent network link recovery from cable, port, or adapter faults.

According to Jim Strachan (CEO), "Our competitors' failover technology may take up to 8 seconds to re-establish a link failure. Furthermore, other failover technology utilizes an Active/Passive methodology whereas the 'Redundant' link sits idle and only transmits data when a link failure is identified. PacketEngine's Active/Active failover improves bandwidth and ROI for organizations wanting to implement Fault Tolerance in their mission critical network applications."

Trunking

PacketEngine supports all industry standard trunking algorithms (Adaptive, Fixed, and Round Robin). It is compatible with all intelligent switches, Fast EtherChannel, Gigabit EtherChannel, and even Sun Trunking. Through AEI's Asymmetrical trunking technology users can trunk server ports to unintelligent switches and even hubs! In addition to Port Aggregation (Layer 1), an added feature of PacketEngine is the ability to create one or more Trunk Groups based on Layer 3 or Layer 4 criteria.

Layer 3 Criteria include:

IP, IPX, AppleTalk, or other.

Layer 4 criteria include:

Internet Protocol (TCP, UDP, ICMP, other).

Destination Address based on IP subnets.

Socket (http, ftp, smtp, or other).