SolarFlare, SMC Team

IRVINE, Calif. -- Solarflare(R) Communications, a leading provider of high-performance Ethernet silicon, and SMC(R) Networks announced today that SMC will incorporate Solarflare PHY and controller silicon components in its standards-based networking products. Among the first products that SMC will launch based on Solarflare components is a family of 10 Gigabit NIC products, which it expects to introduce in the first half of this year. That first wave of products will include SMC 10GBASE-T switches based on Solarflare's 10Xpress(R) PHY, SMC 10G optical server adapters based on Solarflare's Solarstorm(TM) controller silicon, and SMC 10GBASE-T server adapters based on both Solarstorm and 10Xpress. These products will enable the economical adoption of high-performance 10 Gigabit infrastructures this year.

Ideal for use in data center, enterprise workgroup, 1G switch aggregation and small backbone environments, 10GBASE-T brings the performance benefits of 10 Gigabit networking, with the cost-savings inherent in copper-based networking. Applications that drive the need for higher bandwidth include high-performance computing; Web 2.0 application support; multimedia -- content creation and distribution; storage -- converged fabrics using the iSCSI protocol and storage area networking; and server virtualization -- where multiple virtual machines sometimes with heterogeneous operating systems run in isolation on the same physical server.

Seamus Crehan, senior director of Ethernet Switching at the Dell'Oro Group stated, "In our 5-year forecast report on 10 Gigabit Ethernet, we expect port shipments will increase from 300K to almost 12M in 2011. With the advent of 10GBASE-T, we expect 10 Gigabit Ethernet to be a viable and cost effective option for higher volume applications for enterprise and data center networks."

SolarFlare Communications Inc.