Astute Networks Brings SAN Management Intelligence to Storage Infrastructure Vendors.

Business Editors & High-Tech Writers

Storage Networking World Fall 2002

SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 21, 2002

Storage Processor Pericles Brings Virtualization, Mirroring,

Replication, Failover and Capacity Management to Storage OEMs

Astute Networks, an industry leader and designer of silicon-based storage technologies, announced the introduction of Pericles(TM), the highest performance intelligent network storage processor on the market. Pericles allows storage OEMs to build systems that provide a new level of storage services such as virtualization, redundancy management, high availability, on-demand capacity, and bandwidth allocation within the Storage Area Network (SAN) fabric -- resulting in dramatically decreased SAN management complexity and cost. With Pericles, storage OEMs can integrate their own software with any of the industry standard storage protocols such as Fibre Channel, iSCSI, TCP and FCIP resulting in immediate opportunities for storage providers to bring innovative features and capabilities to market.

"Astute Networks is the first company to enable customers to add their own virtualization and storage services, eliminating a deficiency of current solutions," says Linley Gwennap, Principal Analyst of The Linley Group. "By offering TCP, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel processing at speeds of up to 10Gbps, Pericles meets key customer requirements in the storage market and delivers leadership performance with a product that is available today."

According to Dan Tanner, Director of Storage Research at Aberdeen Group, "The time has come for products in the class of the Astute Networks' protocol processor, because they can provide the speed, the performance and connectivity benefits that OEMs need to compete in the storage market. The Astute Networks Storage Processor should afford OEMs faster time to revenue without in-house personnel and expense."

"Intelligent, silicon-empowered storage networking products can help deliver the promise of centralized storage management, bringing IT professionals blended solutions that offer benefits that are needed, but not available today," said Tom Sennhauser, president and CEO, Astute Networks. "Pericles is the highest performance product available today from a new category of storage processors that brings embedded SAN management intelligence to switch-based storage systems. It is being used by leading storage OEMs, since Pericles allows them to quickly extend their sophisticated storage services onto all storage protocols -- dependably and cost-effectively."

Pericles Supplies Essential Advanced Features, Competitive Edge to OEMs

Combining a parallel processor architecture with embedded hardware engines for handling stateful protocols, Pericles leads the field in storage processor performance with wire speeds up to 10 Gbps. The hardware engines not only accelerate any storage protocol but also accelerate functions used to support virtualization, synchronous and asynchronous mirroring, snapshot, failover, and real time traffic monitoring. The result is the highest performance scaleable architecture for intelligent SAN fabrics. Dual SPI-4.2 ports allow traffic to flow through the network to a switching fabric, a key requirement for blades or platforms. A specialized parsing engine allows Pericles to handle any number of storage protocols simultaneously, including proprietary formats. The parsing engine also provides the ability to look deep into SCSI payloads to extract the necessary parameters used by storage services software. Storage OEMs write code using a C-based compiler combined with a C-based simulation model of Pericles to leverage third party software or develop their own application on any of the embedded RISC processors.

Astute's OEM customers include manufacturers of intelligent SAN switches, virtualization platforms, iSCSI gateways, FCIP gateways, storage networking devices, multi-protocol SAN switches, and storage disk arrays. In addition to SAN infrastructure systems, Pericles can also be used for other intelligent networking applications including intrusion detection systems, Layer 7 switches, server load balancing, blade server systems, stateful firewalls, and SSL acceleration platforms. The chip comes in a 720 Ball Grid Array (BGA) package with a footprint of 25 x 32.5 mm. Samples and a Hardware Development Kit (HDK) will be available during the current quarter.

About Astute Networks

Astute Networks, a leading designer of intelligent silicon-based storage technologies, markets essential storage networking technologies to OEM partners worldwide that allow them to deliver competitive advantages and cost-effective solutions to IT professionals. Formed in April 2000 and based in San Diego, Calif., Astute Networks has raised more than $23 million in venture capital funding led by US Venture Partners (USVP) and BA Venture Partners. Additional information on Astute is available at www.astutenetworks.com.

Editor's Note: Astute Networks will be exhibiting at SNW in Orlando, Florida, October 27-October 30th. To set a time to talk with Astute executives at the show, contact Judy Smith, JPR Communications, at 818/386-0403 or email [e-mail]