As Virtualization Expands Into Hardware, IOV Adds Key Element to Enable End-to-End Virtualization in the Data Center

Cupertino, CA — April 17, 2006 — Neterion, Inc., an industry leader in the 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapter market for server and storage environments, announced that the company has developed Hyperframe™, an I/O Virtualization (IOV) architecture that expands hardware support to input/output (I/O) devices, providing end-to-end virtualization for the enterprise data center infrastructure. Platforms that will benefit from this new technology span all elements of the datacenter, from storage to servers, and will be of particular importance to blade server environments.

"Today server and storage virtualization is delivering significant cost reduction and asset optimization benefits to IT managers in corporate data centers," said Dave Zabrowski, President and CEO of Neterion. "Hyperframe is designed to provide hardware support at the I/O component level. Neterion's line of products is offering exclusive features that allow optimization of the network interface in a virtualized environment."

Features included in the Hyperframe architecture are: multiple separate receive and transmit queues, independent Direct Memory Access (DMA) engines, separate network addresses, ability to classify and steer receive traffic, sophisticated interrupt schemes, separate register sets, separate copies of the configuration space, ability to direct packets through the PCI-Express fabric, etc.

"There's no question that virtualization technology is gaining top of mind awareness for IT administrators," stated Carl Claunch, VP of Research at Gartner. "It is especially relevant for server and storage consolidation applications and hardware support for virtualization is quickly gaining momentum."

"As an industry leader in server virtualization, HP is helping customers improve the efficiency of their server platforms and delivering a greater return on their server investment," stated Brian Cox, director of worldwide server marketing, Business Critical Servers, HP. "Neterion's Hyperframe IOV will provide advanced I/O virtualization and is a great complement to the HP Virtual Server Environment, which enables customers to optimize their server resources in real time."

Neterion's current line of Xframe 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters already include most of Hyperframe's features. Future generation Xframe products will offer comprehensive support of Hyperframe, making efficient and robust IOV both affordable and available off-the-shelf.

HP and Neterion are among a select group of companies actively involved in virtualization standardization in the PCI-SIG IOV Working Group. The group is charged with developing a specification that extends the PCI-Express protocol to natively support virtualization in compute client, server and storage environments.

"NextIO has focused on developing PCI Express-based shared I/O solutions since its inception," noted KC Murphy, CEO of NextIO, another key member of the IOV Working Group. "We're very pleased to work with Neterion as our technologies are complementary to each other. The combination of Hyperframe with our shared I/O model allows the development of flexible and versatile IOV devices, enabling extremely agile server architectures. Implementing shared I/O in blade servers, for example, will lower TCO, future-proof blade chassis and simplify management for IT managers."

Benefits to end users of an IOV-based networking architecture include:

• Cost savings — replacing multiple 1 GbE interfaces with a single 10 GbE adapter reduces complexity and administration costs
• Flexibility — dynamically allocating bandwidth across system components rather then limiting bandwidth to a fixed amount per component
• Performance — relieving software from classification and routing of frames resulting in significant reduction of CPU utilization
• Isolation — every OS is presented with its own independent I/O path and is unaware of shared resources with other OS images
• Reliability — users can implement redundancy and fail-over capabilities with the addition of a second 10 GbE interface that results in dynamic management and virtualization of bandwidth

Neterion has developed a whitepaper that provides technical details on the Hyperframe IOV architecture. It is available for download at: http://www.neterion.com/solutions/applications.html.

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 solve customers' high-end networking problems. The Xframe?line of products is based on Neterion-developed technologies that deliver new levels of performance, availability and reliability in the datacenter. Xframe, Xframe II and Xframe E 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.

Hyperframe is a trademark of Neterion, Inc. Xframe, Xframe II and Xframe E are registered trademarks of Neterion, Inc. NextIO is a trademark of NextIO, Inc.

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