Solarflare Secures $26 Million in Private Funding

Business Wire,  June 17, 2008  

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Company readies next-generation 10GBASE-T products for production

IRVINE, Calif. -- Solarflare Communications, the leading provider of standards-compliant 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) silicon, today announced that it has secured an additional $26 million in equity financing. This round of funding includes participation from previous investors, such as Oak Investment Partners, Foundation Capital, Accel Partners and Amadeus Capital Partners.

Solarflare has been shipping the industry's first and only full-performance 10GBASE-T product since September 2006. Moreover, the company has been shipping the industry's lowest-power 10GbE vNIC controller and MAC chip since February 2007. Solarflare will use the equity financing to ramp up its next-generation products, including the industry's lowest-power 10GBASE-T PHY, and boost the volume of production in the 10GbE market.

"With the ever increasing deployment of rich media on demand and server virtualization, enterprises and data centers need robust, standards-compliant 10 Gigabit solutions that are power-efficient and allow for simple upgrades of current Ethernet infrastructures," said Russell Stern, chief executive officer of Solarflare. "Solarflare is the only company shipping both 10GBASE-T PHYs and 10GbE controllers. We lead the market and have design traction with multiple customers. This latest round of funding signifies our investors' continued confidence in Solarflare's ability to execute and grow in this competitive market."

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reports with the current trend, national energy consumption by servers and data centers could nearly double by 2011 to more than 100 billion kWh, representing a $7.4 billion annual electricity cost.1 "Solarflare's 10GbE products enable a whole new energy-efficiency paradigm, based on ubiquitous 10GBASE-T fabrics, where computing resources is allocated dynamically within data centers locally and between data centers globally. This matches server workloads to power consumption and also moves application processing and server workloads to locations with greener, more efficient power generations from such sources as wind, solar or water," stated Professor Andy Hopper, fellow of Corpus Christi College and head of the computer laboratory at the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.

Solarflare's recent funding round will support high-volume shipments of its 10 Gigabit Ethernet controller and 10GBASE-T PHY technology enabling switch, storage and server original design manufacturers (ODMs) and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) worldwide to build standards-compliant 10GbE products for enterprises and data centers. This latest investment brings the total amount raised by Solarflare to over $126 million in six years.

About Solarflare[R] 10 Gigabit Products

Solarflare designs and develops the highest-performing, lowest-power, standards-compliant 10GbE controllers and 10GBASE-T transceivers on the market. Optimized for all key virtualization platforms including Citrix XenEnterprise, Microsoft's Hyper-V and VMware's ESX server, Solarflare's Solarstorm[R] Ethernet controller consumes less than 2.2 watts at full line-rate performance, delivering the optimal balance in performance and power efficiency. Solarflare's 10Xpress[R] 10GBASE-T PHY supports distances of greater than 100 meters on UTP Category 6A cabling, 100 meters on STP Category 6, 55 meters on UTP Category 6 and 45 meters on UTP Category 5E cabling. When combined on a server adapter, Solarflare's 10Xpress 10GBASE-T PHY and Solarstorm 10GbE controller deliver 10 times the performance of a 1 Gigabit NIC at half the power consumption of previous 10GbE server adapters. For additional product information and pricing, send a request to productinfo@solarflare.com.

About Solarflare Communications, Inc.

Solarflare Communications is a semiconductor company delivering the next level of high-performance 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE). As the leading provider of standards-compliant 10GbE silicon, Solarflare delivers robust and power-efficient solutions that are cost effective and easy to deploy. Now real and ready for primetime, Solarflare 10 Gigabit Ethernet makes possible next-generation applications, such as streaming rich media, Web 2.0, server virtualization and network convergence. Solarflare is working with key industry partners and customers to ensure interoperability and drive a complete 10GBASE-T ecosystem. Solarflare has announced relationships with Accton, Citrix, Delta, Ixia, Panduit, SMC and VMware. The privately held company is headquartered in Irvine, CA with a development center in Cambridge, UK. For more information, visit http://www.solarflare.com.

All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their registered owners.

1 NOTE: "EPA Report to Congress on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency" http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/prod_development/downloads/EPA_R eport_Exec_Summary_Final.pdf (Due to its length, this URL may need to be copied/pasted into your Internet browser's address field. Remove the extra space if one exists.)

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