Chelsio Closes Tier-One Deals

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Chelsio Communications Inc., the leading provider of 10-Gigabit Ethernet unified wire solutions, today announced it has signed OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) contracts with eleven new customers (including five Tier-One vendors) for its 10Gb Ethernet Unified Wire solutions. The company estimates these deals alone will generate more than $30 million in revenue for Chelsio in 2008.

Chelsio's new customers are utilizing the industry's fastest and lowest cost 10GbE NICs, as well as the T3 Unified Wire technology. Chelsio technology is being used in a wide range of applications, including WAN acceleration, Network-Attached Storage (NAS) Filers, Storage Area Network (SAN) Arrays, Server Adapters, High Performance Cluster Computing, Video Servers, Server Blades, Application Servers and Web Accelerators. A key attribute of the Chelsio technology is the seamless upgrade path from NIC to RDMA, iSCSI and TOE, which enables customers to invest in the fastest, lowest cost NICs today, and use the same software drivers to deliver the added functionality as needed.

Chelsio's cut-through T3 architecture delivers the highest transactions per second in the industry, in excess of 16 million packets per second.Chelsio's customers are able to use the same drivers for any host bus, any physical media, any offload protocol, and any number of ports and speeds of Ethernet.

"This first wave of OEMs is intent on delivering new converged systems into the market over the next 18 months, and many have already settled on their 10Gb Ethernet technology partners. Some have already upgraded from their current stateless NIC-only solution to the Unified Wire," said Kianoosh Naghshineh, president and CEO of Chelsio. "We are uniquely positioned to deliver the integrated NIC, TOE, iSCSI and RDMA functionality that enables the convergence of storage, clustering and networking on age-old and interoperable Ethernet, TCP and IP standards, and as a result we are winning a large number of deals. We anticipate announcing these customers as the new system-level products are introduced into the market."

Chelsio Communications Inc.