SCIENCE

Solarflare announced that its exit from the physical layer (PHY) business through the sale of the company's 10GBASE-T assets to an unnamed merchant semiconductor company, the details of which cannot be disclosed. This deal will enable Solarflare's existing 10GBASE-T customers to continue to use the company's leading 10GBASE-T products.

Major international equities exchanges are processing billions of transactions a day, worth trillions of US dollars. Exchanges and trading houses are under tremendous competitive pressure to process trades with sub millisecond, if not microsecond, latency. To support this changing landscape, Solarflare launched a family of 10GbE SFP+ and 10GBASE-T server adapters and a robust portfolio of OpenOnload and EnterpriseOnload application acceleration middleware in 2010 and Q1 2011. Solarflare's 10GbE adapters, in combination with its OpenOnload middleware, have created a compelling value proposition for high frequency traders by reducing latency and increasing message rates for TCP/IP traffic in market data feeds, while maintaining compatibility with customer applications and installed Ethernet and TCP/IP infrastructure.

"Our deal to sell the 10GBASE-T business is good for our current installed base of 10GBASE-T customers who will now benefit from having continued support for the best 10GBASE-T product on the market," said Russell Stern, CEO at Solarflare. "We have now reached critical mass. Solarflare will continue to build on its success in the 10GbE server adapter market by growing share in high frequency trading and HPC segments, and launching solutions targeting the virtualization and big data segments. We're excited by what the rest of 2011 will bring to the company."

Solarflare's 10GbE adapter is built from the ground up to support high-performance, low-latency, cut-through application performance. The adapter's scalable vNIC architecture provides up to 2,048 protected interfaces to the host system that OpenOnload uses to map applications directly to the NIC hardware. Those same vNIC interfaces are also used to enable virtual machine application acceleration and CPU core scaling. The company's 10GbE products are the most frequently used 10GbE server adapters on Wall Street and Solarflare has completed more third-party market data test benchmark reports than any other 10GbE adapter vendor.

In addition to high frequency trading, Solarflare's recent publication of customer case studies highlights its success in the HPC segment. Solarflare was instrumental in upgrading the German Climate Computing Center (Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum) network from 1GbE to 10GbE in order to better support bandwidth-intensive 3D visualization applications. Solarflare also helped the DOE Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) upgrade from Infiniband to 10GbE, which improved the performance of complex simulations by 36 percent.

Solarflare has also built an international network of over 25 value-added resellers and five distributors and now sells its server adapters through Dell, HP and IBM. At the end of 2010, the Dell'Oro Group identified Solarflare as the fastest growing 10G server adapter company in a market segment, projected to grow to nearly $1.5B by 2015.