San Jose, Calif. — April 25, 2003 — Alacritech®, Inc., the innovator of network accelerator solutions that enable fast and efficient servers and storage systems, today announced that Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 demonstrates record-level file serving performance when combined with Alacritech’s Gigabit Ethernet Server and Storage Accelerators. Results published in a Microsoft-commissioned test report from VeriTest, a division of Lionbridge Technologies, Inc., shows that servers running Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and utilizing Alacritech TCP/IP accelerators achieved over three times the file server performance and throughput of Windows NT 4.0 Server Enterprise Edition using conventional network adapters.

“Microsoft’s latest server platform helps businesses achieve greater continuity and consolidation without sacrificing performance,” said Larry Boucher, president and CEO, Alacritech, Inc. “Combining our TCP/IP accelerators with Windows Server 2003 gives customers a solution that offers unmatched efficiency, value and flexibility for their applications and file server environments.”

For the file server performance tests, VeriTest installed Alacritech’s Gigabit Ethernet Server and Storage Accelerator cards in an HP ProLiant DL760G2 server running Microsoft Windows Server 2003. VeriTest used Ziff Davis Media’s NetBench 7.02 benchmarking software to conduct performance tests using the Alacritech Gigabit Accelerators and conventional NICs in an eight-processor configuration. The performance report can be found on the VeriTest Web site.

The combination of Windows Server 2003 and Alacritech TCP/IP Offload Engines (TOEs) achieved a 212% improvement over Windows NT 4.0 using Intel NICs. Specifically, Windows Server 2003 performance results with Alacritech’s TOE reached 1370 Mbps compared with 439 Mbps for Windows NT 4.0 using the Intel NICs. Windows Server 2003 combined with Alacritech’s TOE achieved 132% greater throughput than Windows 2000 Advanced Server using the Intel NICs which reached 591 Mbps. In addition, Alacritech achieved a significant performance improvement over Intel NICs in identical Windows Server 2003 configurations. The tests results prove that Windows Server 2003 and Alacritech TCP/IP accelerators provide the industry’s best performance for file server solutions running SMB/CIFS protocols.

About Alacritech Acceleration Technology
As systems and servers move increasing amounts of network data, new solutions are needed to solve both efficiency and throughput challenges. Alacritech’s SLIC Technology supplements the TCP software control plane with distributed hardware data planes to maximize data movement through Ethernet-based networks. This revolutionary data-path TCP/IP offload engine (TOE) architecture is designed to maximize server and storage performance and efficiency. All Alacritech products offer industry-standard failover and link aggregation.

About Alacritech, Inc.
Alacritech, Inc. was founded by Larry Boucher, creator of the SCSI interface, to deliver upon his vision of eliminating the server bottleneck. Today, Alacritech is the innovator of network accelerator solutions that enable fast and efficient servers and storage systems. Alacritech's complete line of high-performance server and storage accelerators is based on the company's patented SLIC (session-layer interface control) Technology to optimize the performance of servers, network-attached storage and iSCSI storage devices. SLIC Technology is the first fully compatible and scalable technology to offload network protocol processing, primarily TCP/IP, from software on the host system to silicon on the adapter. Based in San Jose, California, Alacritech is privately held. Alacritech is a member of the Storage Networking Association (SNIA) and a founding member of the SNIA IP Storage Forum. For more information about Alacritech and its products, please visit the company's Web site at www.alacritech.com.

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