Neterion Launches Industry's First PCI Express 10 Gb Ethernet Adapter

Business Wire, Feb 24, 2005

CUPERTINO, Calif. -- Major Server and Storage Vendors Adopting the PCI Express Serial I/O Interconnect to Meet Rapidly Growing Bandwidth Requirements

Today Neterion Inc., formerly S2io Inc., the industry leader in the emerging 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapter market, announced Xframe E(TM), a new adapter based on the PCI Express bus architecture as a response to the growing demand by OEMs to offer products based on this next generation of I/O (Input/Output) interconnect.

The industry's first PCI Express-based adapter ensures that the 10 Gigabit Ethernet market offers a range of choices to end users, since server and storage OEMs can now incorporate the performance leading Xframe solution in all three major bus architectures: PCI-X 1.0, PCI-X 2.0 and now, PCI Express.

"The design for Xframe E is based on customer requests, as OEMs recognize the need to include the next generation I/O architecture in their server and storage platforms," noted Dave Zabrowski, Neterion's President & CEO. "With the addition of Xframe E, we are proud to offer the ultimate customer choice in standard bus architecture for 10 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity."

Neterion meets each of the vendor requests by adding PCI Express support to already deployed PCI-X solutions. The new 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapter requires no expensive rewrites to the end users' operating system software and they are able to keep their host-based TCP/IP stacks intact for reliability and security purposes.

"There's no question that PCI Express is gaining momentum in the marketplace and Neterion's 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapter is a natural complement to this improved interconnect technology," stated Bob Wheeler, senior analyst at The Linley Group and co-author of a new report entitled A Guide to Gigabit and 10G Ethernet Silicon.

"There's real value in the bandwidth scalability inherent in the PCI Express architecture, which should deliver immediate benefits to server and storage OEMs."

PCI Express is serial, rather than parallel, interconnect technology featuring advantages such as scalable bus bandwidth, lower overhead and lower latency and improved QoS. All major server and storage vendors are designing products equipped with PCI Express to meet the needs of customers who are requiring higher I/O performance resulting from factors like the exponential growth of enterprise data, server consolidation, virtualization of IT assets, increased need for security and regulatory compliance, etc. Major vertical markets include pharmaceutical, financial, energy, transportation, education, government and defense.

As the OEMs roll out their products based on the varying interconnect architectures, IT managers for enterprise data centers will now be able to select the platform that optimizes the performance of their server and storage networks. Neterion will be making additional product and customer announcements throughout 2005.

About Neterion Inc.

Founded in 2001, Neterion Inc. has locations in Cupertino, Calif. and Ottawa, Canada. Neterion delivers 10 Gigabit Ethernet hardware & software solutions that enable OEMs to solve their customers' high-end networking problems. The company's line of Xframe(R) products is based on Neterion-developed technologies that deliver new levels of performance, availability and reliability in the datacenter. Xframe, Xframe II and Xframe E include full IPv4 and IPv6 support, and comprehensive stateless offloads that preserve the integrity of current TCP/IP implementations without "breaking the stack." Xframe drivers are available for all major Operating Systems, including Microsoft Windows, Linux, Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX, IBM's AIX, Sun's Solaris and SGI's Irix. Neterion has raised over $42M in funding with its latest C round taking place in June 2004. Formerly known as S2io, the company changed its name to Neterion in January 2005.

Further information on the company can be found at http://www.neterion.com/

About Xframe E

In addition to the PCI Express bus interface, Xframe E benefits include ease-of-design and implementation by reusing many of the same technologies introduced by Neterion's existing products. Xframe E maintains hardware and software compatibility with the previous generation products.

The Neterion, Xframe, Xframe II and Xframe E names and logos and combinations thereof, are trademarks of Neterion, Inc. Other names are for informational purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective owners.