INDUSTRY

NetXen, Inc., a leading provider of breakthrough 10-Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) technology and products, today announced that it has been elected as a governing member of Blade.org and will join the organization's board of directors. As a board member, NetXen will work with the association to influence and promote the direction of the blade server market and encourage creation of new blade solution offerings. Blade.org is an open community created to develop and advance next-generation solutions for blade servers. Vikram Karvat, senior director of marketing at NetXen, will serve as the company's board representative. Karvat, a 15-year industry veteran, has been instrumental in leading NetXen's marketing and business development efforts in the server and blade server segments. "NetXen's addition to the Blade.org board further strengthens our organization leadership team and its representation across key segments of the blade ecosystem," said Doug Balog, chairman for Blade.org and vice president and business line executive for IBM BladeCenter. "NetXen is a premier NIC technology provider, with a feature set optimized to blade servers. NetXen brings a high degree of technical knowledge and market expertise to our board of directors, which will be extremely valuable as we continue to expand the Blade.org community and set ongoing direction for the organization." NetXen's Commitment to the Blade Market Blade servers are the fastest growing segment of the server market. They enable higher compute density in the enterprise datacenter and significantly reduce the operational costs associated with provisioning, management and maintenance of servers. As a result, blade servers are being deployed within all tiers of the datacenter. They are being used for edge applications like Web servers, as well as for bandwidth-hungry applications such as storage, database, engineering simulation and video transport. Blades are now adopting 10GbE as the transport of choice to drive further increases in performance and cost efficiencies. NetXen has shown a tremendous commitment to the blade market and has been a member of Blade.org since the organization was launched in February 2006. NetXen's Intelligent NIC products were the industry's first dual-port 10GbE offering, making the technology a leading solution choice for 10GbE blade server designs. As a result, the company has enjoyed broad success as a technology provider to the blade server market. NetXen is strongly committed to advancing the blade market, through close collaboration with leading OEM vendors and ecosystem partners. "We are honored to take a seat on the board of directors of such as well- respected and important organization," said NetXen's Karvat. "Blade.org has made great strides in bringing together leading blade hardware and software providers, developers, distribution partners and end users. Collaboration among members will help bring blade platform solutions to market more quickly, advancing the overall industry. We're very excited about the opportunity to have a role in shaping one of this decade's most significant evolutions in the enterprise datacenter."