NetEffect Debuts 10 Gigabit Ethernet Channel Adapters; Company is First to Fully Implement iWARP Ethernet Specification.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Today at Supercomputing 2004, NetEffect, a leader in developing high-performance networking solutions, formally introduced its first family of 10Gb iWARP Ethernet Channel Adapters (ECA). The NetEffect NE01 ECA fully implements the iWARP Ethernet standards, delivering up to 10Gbps data rates and concurrent access to networking, storage and clustering connectivity over existing Ethernet infrastructures.

For network administrators and chief information officers, providing users with multi-gigabit data access performance has been an expensive proposition. Complex technologies, such as Fibre Channel and InfiniBand, offer performance but require costly investments in specialized hardware and software. For those able to bear that initial cost, the results were often unsatisfactory, as it meant maintaining parallel specialized data center fabrics, for storage, server clustering or data networking traffic.

Now, iWARP is poised to change all that. Created by the RDMA Consortium and IETF, iWARP is a series of extensions to Ethernet and TCP/IP that virtually eliminates the overhead associated with networking. Since iWARP is Ethernet and, therefore, fully compatible with today's Ethernet infrastructures, the resulting performance improvements come without the cost premiums demanded by earlier, proprietary technologies.

The NetEffect NE01 family of Ethernet Channel Adapters fully implements the iWARP specifications delivering all of the benefits of OS bypass, transport offload, and RDMA in a high performance adapter. The NE01 supports concurrent iWARP, iSER, iSCSI, and standard TCP/IP traffic over multiple bi-directional 10Gb ports with minimal latency.

NetEffect's proven Virtual Pipeline Architecture scales to millions of packets per second, fully saturating multiple 10Gb ports. Supporting hundreds of thousands of simultaneous connections, the NE01 family provides the right solution for the most demanding data center applications.

With NetEffect's iWARP solutions, IT managers can now deliver networking, clustering, and storage at 10Gbps data rates across a single Ethernet fabric using common interchangeable components (adapters, switches, routers) and without disruption of existing business applications and network management software. While increasing performance, NetEffect ECAs also drastically reduce total cost of ownership. NetEffect's use of Ethernet -- the world's most pervasive networking standard -- means IT departments won't have to learn a new technology, eliminating training costs; common spares can be used rather than expensive proprietary hardware; and existing investments in management software can be preserved and extended.

"At NetEffect we're proud to be the first to introduce a full implementation of iWARP to the marketplace," said Rick Maule, president and CEO, NetEffect. "Industry analysts, data center managers and business computer users will tell you the demand for data throughput continues to grow dramatically every year. iWARP will virtually eliminate the overhead required to process networking traffic and enable broad deployment of 10 Gigabit Ethernet in the data center. NetEffect is meeting the needs of today's data intensive environments by enabling iWARP, the next wave of Ethernet."

"As data-center bandwidth demands continue to grow, the existing Ethernet standard is becoming inadequate to meet these needs," commented Linley Gwennap, principal analyst of The Linley Group. "To unlock the full potential of Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet, hardware acceleration of iWARP is needed. NetEffect's NE01 product family provides the high throughput, low latency, and standards compliance required to support this trend."

Pricing and Availability

The NetEffect NE01 product family will be generally available in Q1, 2005. List pricing begins at $1,195.

About NetEffect

NetEffect (a venture-funded enterprise headquartered in Austin, Texas) is a network solutions company developing products to enable the next generation of high-performance, multi-gigabit Ethernet. NetEffect's products allow Ethernet to easily scale to meet data center demands for networking, storage, and clustering. These products are full implementations of the iWARP Ethernet standards and fully compatible with the Ethernet infrastructure found in today's data centers. Visit www.neteffect.com for more information.