NETWORKS

Force10 Networks has been positioned in the visionary quadrant of Gartner's Global Campus LAN Magic Quadrant 2004. Force10 is the only company to be to in Gartner's annual assessment of leading global campus LAN vendors in 2004 and the only private company included in the report. Vendors in the Global Campus LAN Magic Quadrant have the ability to deliver either all or a significant part of large enterprise requirements for an Ethernet LAN infrastructure. Gartner positions vendors in the Magic Quadrant based on completeness of vision and ability to execute. Completeness of vision measures understanding of the market and preparedness to meet market requirements into the future while ability to execute measures how a vendor is performing in the current market. Based on both criteria, Gartner positioned Force10 in the visionary quadrant. "Gartner's recognition of Force10 as a visionary in its Magic Quadrant is the culmination of a year of product innovation, market share growth and worldwide customer expansion," said Andrew Feldman, vice president of marketing for Force10 Networks. "As the only private company listed in the quadrant, Force10 has clearly distinguished itself with its industry-leading TeraScale E-Series and innovative vision of resilient networking." According to the report, authored by Gartner Vice President Mark Fabbi, Force10 has carved out a position at the very high end of the market in large data centers and high performance computing environments. With market leading performance and density, the Force10 TeraScale E-Series can build fully non-blocking, scalable core networks for a small fraction of the cost of the other vendors. Over the last year, Force10 has been recognized as the leading private company in the networking industry. In March, Force10 was named Investor's Choice at the prestigious Network Outlook conference by more than 300 business leaders, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and industry analysts. In May, Red Herring recognized Force10 as a top private company transforming the technology industry. And this month, Light Reading named Force10 a finalist in the top IPO, best new product and best marketing categories of its annual Leading Lights awards. Force10 recently introduced its second-generation family of switch/routers, the TeraScale E-Series, which leads the industry in density, performance and resiliency. The TeraScale E-Series supports 672 line-rate Gigabit and 56 line-rate 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports in a single chassis and can process one billion packets per second, the highest in the industry. And, with support for an industry-leading one million access control lists (ACLs), the TeraScale E-Series provides scalable protection against denial of service attacks. According to The Tolly Group, the Force10 TeraScale E-Series is the first Terabit Ethernet switch/router.