INDUSTRY

NetXen, a startup providing breakthrough 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) technology, today brought the industry closer to widespread 10GbE deployment with the launch of its multi-protocol, intelligent network interface controller product family. Top-tier system suppliers, including HP and IBM, plan to incorporate NetXen's Intelligent NIC technology in products currently under development. NetXen's chip- and board-level products are ideally suited for enterprises seeking a cost-effective, high-performance solution for datacenter networks. With its patented architecture, NetXen's Intelligent NIC increases datacenter network performance by a factor of 10 and system power efficiency by 50 percent, at less than half the cost of current solutions. The datacenter is undergoing a major evolution. Blade servers, server consolidation and the convergence of network fabrics at 10 Gigabit speeds are driving an exponential increase in both data volumes and protocol complexity. Against this backdrop of escalating network processing demands, IT managers must address the challenge of system power consumption and cooling. NetXen's Intelligent NIC is an elegant, cost-effective solution that alleviates these problems while scaling datacenter performance. "HP selected NetXen to provide 10 Gigabit capabilities for our volume ProLiant and BladeSystem products," said Paul Perez, vice president, SNI, Industry Standard Servers, HP. "We anticipate building reference scale-out architectures and solutions combining NetXen's Intelligent NIC performance and flexibility with HP's strength in management, automation and virtualization. As datacenters evolve toward a converged, intelligent and secure infrastructure, our momentum with over ten million standard servers sold to date will bring the next-generation datacenter out of the corporate space and into the hands of enterprise and mid-tier customers." According to Jeff Benck, vice president, IBM BladeCenter and xSeries Development, "NetXen is a member of Blade.org, an open community working to develop and advance next-generation technologies for blades. 10 Gigabit Ethernet is a major technology thrust for IBM's recently announced BladeCenter High Performance System. It will increase overall network performance and fulfill the promise of the converged IP network, leading to lower total cost of ownership. IBM selected NetXen's solution for the BladeCenter High Performance System because it will help us bring datacenter performance, agility and affordability to the next level for our customers." Kevin Kettler, chief technology officer of Dell stated, "NetXen will help drive the industry from 1 Gigabit to 10 Gigabit Ethernet with Intelligent NIC solutions. The transition is the natural next step as the industry continues to drive for higher performance communication interfaces." NetXen Intelligent NIC products achieve industry firsts The NetXen Intelligent NIC products are the first dual-port 10 Gigabit solutions on the market, and the first to offer native PCI-Express (PCIe) support. They are software- and firmware-upgradeable, unlike existing hardwired solutions, which enable server systems to readily evolve with changing market needs and adapt to different datacenter workloads. This offers IT managers greater flexibility and investment protection in an ever changing climate. "We developed NetXen's Intelligent NIC so that businesses can reap the cost and performance benefits of 10 Gigabit technology sooner rather than later," said Govind Kizhepat, founder and CEO of NetXen. "No one else can match our chip's abilities with regard to real throughput, power and cost optimization in a non-intrusive manner transparent to the operating system and host applications." Key features of NetXen's Intelligent NIC -- Provides an integrated solution with dual 10GbE and native PCIe functionality -- Drives system efficiency and performance by offloading multiple network protocols simultaneously -- Enables datacenter consolidation and virtualization -- Uses an operating-system-agnostic approach to protocol offload -- Evolves to meet changing IT requirements through its adaptable firmware-based implementation -- Achieves high throughput and low latency suitable for clustering and storage applications -- Enables datacenter performance to scale while increasing power efficiency Availability NetXen's Intelligent NIC products are available immediately.