Neterion Collaborates with Sun on Development of Next Generation 10 GbE Featuring an Offload Engine with RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) Capability

Cupertino, Calif. — August 23, 2004 — Neterion Inc. (formerly S2io Inc.), a leader in high-speed server and storage I/O solutions, announced that drivers for its Xframe™ 10 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter will be integrated into Sun Microsystems, Inc.'s Solaris™ Operating System (OS) for SPARC®, AMD Opteron™ and Intel® Xeon™ based systems. In addition, Neterion will be working with Sun to deliver a TCP/IP offload engine (TOE) with RDMA functionality to enhance performance and scalability in intense compute/server environments.

The industry-leading Solaris OS is designed to provide customers with a secure, available and high-performance platform for mission-critical workloads and key enterprise applications. Combining Xframe, Neterion's 10 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter, with the new high-performance TCP/IP architecture in Solaris, also known as project FireEngine, will offer customers inherent performance advantages.

"Working with Neterion will help us to jointly address customer demand for higher levels of server performance due to the exponential growth of data," said Glenn Weinberg, vice president, Operating Platforms Group, Sun Microsystems. "Sun's work on streamlining the IP stack for Solaris 10, together with Xframe's 10 Gigabit Ethernet capabilities, will allow customers to benefit from significantly enhanced throughput, performance and scalability in their IT infrastructures."

In high-end compute/server environments, Xframe's 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapter can deliver up to a 6 to 8 times increase in performance, a 50 percent reduction in latency and a six- to eight-fold reduction in cabling expense. And since the Ethernet protocol is retained, no additional training is required for data center personnel.

"We're very pleased for this opportunity to work with Sun, a company known worldwide for its innovative products," stated Dave Zabrowski, President and CEO of Neterion. "This is another clear example of the growing demand for 10 Gigabit Ethernet and its unique ability to offer a clear path for server optimization while protecting existing data center investment."

Neterion will also be working with Sun to develop an offload engine with RDMA capabilities. The biggest bottleneck in data centers today is the interface between servers. This is caused by traditional bus architectures that require servers to place too many processing demands on the host CPU. Traditionally, servers have to copy data between application memory and the kernel, which can result in significant degradation in performance as the CPU becomes overloaded.

Servers equipped with RDMA-enabled offload engines, or R-NICs, can share memory with zero copying and bypass the kernel, even from remote locations and this enables the servers to focus on processing applications. The result is wire-speed connectivity that will allow networked servers and storage devices to transmit data at rates exceeding 10 gigabits/second. Data center management will see dramatically reduced latency, exponential increases in bandwidth performance, yet they can still maintain their existing infrastructure because the network is based on the ubiquitous Ethernet protocol.

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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