“WHAM has done an outstanding job with on-time delivery and quality engineering,” comments Tom Allen, Vice-President of Engineering for Interphase Corporation.

Interphase, a Dallas, TX corporation, needed a lead designer for an AIX version of a combination hardware/software product they had successfully marketed on SunOS.

Allen recalls, “In August, 1993, Interphase contracted with WHAM to develop an AIX 3.2.5 driver and installation package for our MCA Network Coprocessor.” William Sullivan, Principal Software Engineer for WHAM, Inc., says, “Their product offloaded NFS processing on Ethernet networks for large NFS data servers. Interphase had designed a microchannel adapter and asked WHAM to design an AIX device driver, and to port a special NFS server that would interface to the driver.”

“As work began,” says Tom Allen, “Interphase’s internal resources became scarce.” William Sullivan says that “When Interphase was unable to provide resources to complete the software development, they assigned the whole task to WHAM. Three of us took on the project.”

WHAM was assigned development of all of the AIX software and firmware development for the adapter. The host side included an adapter driver, a network interface driver, an NFS server and a daemon that monitored the route table and transmitted updates to the IP code on the adapter. Entirely packaged in AIX installp format, the product included monitoring and administration utilities, as well as adapter diagnostics.

Sullivan says, “We completed development of the product in nine months with three people, working jointly with IBM. It culminated in the announcement that the IBM R24 was the fastest NFS uniprocessor on the market when using three of the Interphase Network Coprocessor adapters.”

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