NetXen Announces Support for Microsoft's TCP Chimney Offload Architecture

NetXen Conducts First 10GbE TCP Chimney Offload Demonstration at WinHEC 2006

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Seattle, WinHEC, May 23, 2006 - NetXen, Inc., a fabless semiconductor company providing breakthrough 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) technology, today announced the company's Intelligent NIC^®s will support Microsoft's TCP Chimney Offload architecture, a key ingredient in the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Scalable Networking Pack. The TCP Chimney Offload architecture offloads the TCP protocol processing to NetXen's Intelligent NIC, allowing datacenter performance to scale while preserving customer investments in applications, management frameworks and security. In keeping with NetXen's philosophy of investment protection, this capability is provided as a firmware upgrade to the existing Intelligent NIC family announced earlier in the year.

Microsoft's TCP Chimney Offload architecture is an operating system interface that allows NetXen's Intelligent NICs to completely manage Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) data transfer, including acknowledgement (ACK) processing, congestion management, retransmission, and maintenance of TCP state. This enables a 50 percent increase in throughput, in combination with a 3X reduction in central processing unit (CPU) utilization. The result is wire speed 10 gigabit transfers at 20 percent of a single CPU for standard 1500 byte packets - an unprecedented level of performance from a processor efficiency and network throughput standpoint.

NetXen's Intelligent NIC in combination with Microsoft's Scalable Networking Pack is a balanced approach to system design that allows IT managers to scale server performance in a power-efficient manner, while preserving application compatibility and standard network management practices.

NetXen Intelligent NICs are a new category of server networking solutions for high-speed 10 gigabit enterprise networks, which are software and firmware upgradable. The programmability of the Intelligent NIC offers networking solutions that are capable of adapting to meet evolving needs in the datacenter, saving customers time and money. NetXen's Intelligent NIC is an integrated 10GbE solution featuring either single- or dual-port functionality, with native PCI-Express (PCIe) support.

"NetXen has shown a firm commitment to bringing Microsoft's TCP Chimney Offload architecture to the market," said Margaret Arakawa, senior director, Server and Tools Business at Microsoft Corporation. "NetXen's cost-effective TCP Chimney Offload solution will help to bring 10GbE to mainstream servers enabling greater scalability for applications like backup and file serving."

"NetXen is dedicated to providing its customers with best-of-breed, field-upgradable solutions for 10GbE networking, and we're pleased to be rolling out support for Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 Scalable Networking Pack," said Vikram Karvat, vice president of marketing at NetXen. "Microsoft's TCP Chimney Offload will introduce new levels of network performance to the datacenter, providing IT managers' tremendous application scalability and power efficiency."

NetXen will be providing technology demonstrations of its Intelligent NIC cards at WinHEC in booth 311, and will be presenting the technology on Tuesday May 23 at 2pm in the WinHEC session "Using NDIS 6.0, TCP Chimney Offload and RSS to Achieve High Performance Networking."

Availability
NetXen's Intelligent NIC products are currently shipping to leading server OEMs.

About NetXen, Inc.
NetXen, Inc. is a privately-held company that manufactures intelligent 10 Gigabit Ethernet networking chips that advance enterprise datacenter performance and agility. Founded in February 2002 by chip design veteran Govind Kizhepat, the company is headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif., with an office in Pune, India. NetXen's protocol- and OS-agnostic Intelligent NICs are designed for volume 10 Gigabit deployments and are targeted at server, storage, security and networking systems. Additional information about the company and its patented chip architecture is available at www.netxen.com.

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