Xframe™ Server/Storage Adapter Unveiled with Live Demonstrations at Gartner's ITxpo

SAN JOSE, Calif. — October 20, 2003 — Neterion Inc. (formerly S2io Inc.), Inc., an emerging leader in high-speed server and storage I/O solutions, today announced the company's first product. Xframe is a 10 Gigabit Ethernet PCI-X server/storage adapter that is designed for high performance networked server and storage environments.

The live 10 Gigabit Ethernet network demonstration at the Gartner ITxpo is a joint initiative by Neterion, Cisco Systems, and Hewlett Packard. The demonstration includes an Neterion Xframe PCI-X 10 Gigabit Ethernet server/storage adapter, Cisco's Catalyst 6500 multilayer switch equipped with wire rate 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports, and HP's RX 2600 2U servers.

"We are launching a product that will enable IT managers to scale their computing environment backbone to 10 Gigabit Ethernet to meet their increasing demands for greater bandwidth," said Dave Zabrowski, Neterion's President and CEO. "The installed base of client computers and application servers is rapidly shifting to higher speeds causing constrained networked environments in corporate data centers. Xframe makes 10 Gigabit Ethernet real."

Driving the demand for this increase in Ethernet bandwidth are applications such as video streaming, multi-media content distribution, high-speed storage, high performance computing, and cluster computing. To meet these demands, the switch infrastructure for 10 Gigabit Ethernet is also evolving with feature-rich products coming to market at attractive prices, enabling CIOs and IT professionals to adopt 10 Gigabit Ethernet as a mainstream, end-to-end solution.

"As applications have grown in complexity, we have seen a need to upgrade our networking backbone to 10 Gigabit Ethernet," noted Dave Wiltzius, Network Division Leader at the University of California Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. "We are currently testing Xframe evaluation units from Neterion. Technology such as Xframe will enable us to connect servers and storage to our networking backbone enabling more bandwidth for our applications."

For server applications, Xframe can be placed in a standard PCI-X slot for port aggregation replacing many1 Gigabit Ethernet ports with a single 10 Gigabit Ethernet port, significantly increasing performance and lowering total cost of ownership. The IEEE 802.3ae compliant card leverages existing data center infrastructure, requiring no changes to existing cabling , operating systems or network administration tools.

In storage applications, Xframe is designed to deliver performance and latency improvements. Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliances equipped with Xframe can deliver speeds up to five times faster than existing 2 Gigabit Fibre Channel offerings. In addition, Xframe delivers seven times lower latency versus existing Ethernet technology.

Cisco Systems and Hewlett Packard have been working closely to provide the infrastructure necessary to support 10Gigabit Ethernet from the network core through to the datacenter. Xframe will enable the widespread deployment of 10Gigabit Ethernet to the compute and storage devices in the data center, significantly growing the addressable market.

"Fortune 500 customers process enormous amounts of data and they are interested in adopting the high performance, reliability and instant ROI benefits of 10 Gigabit Ethernet," stated Vish Mulchand, Director of Hewlett Packard's Business Critical Servers. "Neterion's announcement is another important step in driving the adoption of this next level of Ethernet technology."

The major leading server, storage and switching OEMs have been conducting validation testing with Xframe and performance results have been exceptional. Pricing and delivery information is now available to server and storage OEMs.

About Neterion, Inc.
Founded in 2001, Neterion Inc. has locations in Cupertino, California and Ottawa, Canada. Neterion delivers 10 Gigabit Ethernet hardware & software solutions that enable OEMs to solve their customers' high-end networking problems. The company's line of Xframe® products is based on Neterion-developed technologies that deliver new levels of performance, availability and reliability in the datacenter. Xframe and Xframe II include full IPv4 and IPv6 support, and comprehensive stateless offloads that preserve the integrity of current TCP/IP implementations without "breaking the stack." Xframe drivers are available for all major Operating Systems, including Microsoft Windows, Linux, Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX, IBM's AIX, Sun's Solaris and SGI's Irix. Formerly known as S2io, the company changed its name to Neterion in January 2005.

Further information on the company can be found at http://www.neterion.com/

The Neterion, Xframe, Xframe II names and logos and combinations thereof, are trademarks of Neterion, Inc. Other names are for informational purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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