MANUFACTURING

Force10 Networks, a pioneer in scalable resiliency for high performance switching and routing, increased the number of Layer 3 Ten Gigabit Ethernet ports shipped in the fourth quarter of 2003 at a faster pace than its closest competitors. According to the Dell'Oro Group's most recent quarterly Ethernet Switch Report, Force10 experienced 160 percent growth in Layer 3 Ten Gigabit Ethernet port shipments, compared with third quarter 2003 shipments. Force10's closest competitors reported increases of 23 percent and 20 percent, respectively, during the same period. "Force10's E Series of switch/routers was engineered from the ground up to be the industry's most scalable and resilient line-rate platform," said Andrew Feldman, vice president of marketing at Force10. "Many of the network design and expansion plans that we see around the world from large enterprises and service provides call for the scalability and reliability that only Force10 can offer, and that is translating into rapidly increasing port shipments." The Force10 E-Series has been deployed in customer networks since September 2002, and has more than a million hours of collective operational time. Battle-tested in networks around the world, the E-Series delivers the most robust 10 Gigabit Ethernet switching and routing functionality in the industry, leveraging its innovative system design to bring the reliability and predictability required for high performance networking environments. In the fourth quarter of 2003, Force10 announced new 10 Gigabit Ethernet deployments in telecommunications carriers, educational institutions, governmental organizations, and large corporations. In Korea, Hanaro Telecom deployed the Force10 E-Series in a countrywide network upgrade to 10 Gigabit Ethernet. In China, Tsinghua University and Shenzhen University City also deployed the E-Series to build 10 Gigabit Ethernet campus networks. Additionally, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois deployed the Force10 E-Series in phase two of the TeraGrid project. According to the Dell'Oro Group's Five Year Ethernet Forecast, the 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch market will grow from $39 million in 2002, to $1.6 billion in 2007. Analysts expect that the early volume deployments of 10 Gigabit Ethernet will be on high-end modular platforms, such as the Force10 E-Series, in large campus backbones, inter-campus connections and larger data centers.