today announced that it has reached an agreement with TeraBurst Networks Inc. to become an authorized reseller of TeraBurst's optical networking products for distributed visualization applications.
SGI reports that this agreement complements existing Visual Area Networking (VAN) offerings by adding TeraBurst products for connectivity between SGI Reality Center facilities.
The combination of technologies is designed to allow both technical and creative users to achieve the highest levels of remote interactivity over fast and reliable optical networks, while maintaining the superior image quality of SGI systems.
SGI originally introduced VAN in January 2002 with goal of accelerating work processes and bringing distributed, collaborative teams together around their data.
SGI claims that VAN has gained acceptance in government, education and industry sectors. These customers, SGI said, have complex visualization needs that are met by the SGI Onyx family systems and that VAN delivers this power to them regardless of their location or visualization resources.
TeraBurst's optical networking capabilities are designed to enable remote users and decision-making teams in a VAN environment to see the stereo frame rates and image quality generated by the SGI Onyx systemFor example, multisite command-and-control teams can use the long distance graphics distribution capabilities from TeraBurst to leverage the data fusion capabilities of an SGI Onyx system to interact with multiple remote high-resolution data and video streams in a 3D environment.
"TeraBurst's technology within an SGI VAN environment gives customers an industry-first solution for real-time transmission of 3D stereoscopic graphics, video and audio — across optical networks — and will expand SGI's leadership in the high-end visualization markets," said Terry Oberdank, vice president, Technology Solutions, SGI.
TeraBurst's V2O platform is a network interface that's designed to directly convert the video signal from SGI systems to a standard telecom-ready signal for either OC3 or OC48 Synchronous Optical Network (SONET)-based optical networks. The systems are designed to enable low-latency transmission of high-quality graphics images synchronized with real-time audio and control data, over a single optical signal for secure and reliable transport within public or private optical networks.
"We expect our combined technologies to enable new applications in multiple industries by offering high-performance interactivity between SGI Reality Center facilities within VAN environments," said Claude Sandroff, senior vice president of sales and business development for TeraBurst Networks.
SGI VAN solutions are designed to deliver interactive and multisite collaborative visualization capabilities through either SGI OpenGL Vizserver software, which runs across standard TCP/IP-based local and wide area networks, or now with TeraBurst's hardware-based alternative for optical networks.
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