San Jose, Calif. — May 20, 2003 — Alacritech®, Inc., the innovator of solutions that accelerate data delivery, today announced that its Gigabit Ethernet Server and Storage Accelerator, the industry’s only Integrated Storage Network Interface Card (IS-NIC), is rapidly penetrating the medical market. A number of leading healthcare facilities including Erlanger Health System and University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) are today leveraging Alacritech’s industry leading TCP/IP offload technology to achieve the highest performance and efficiency in their critical medical IT environments.

“Some of the nation’s top healthcare organizations are implementing TOE technology to cost-effectively maximize system performance and extend their IT resources,” said Kim Peyser, senior vice president of sales and marketing, Alacritech, Inc. “By utilizing Alacritech technology, these facilities are gaining a tremendous return on investment simply by doubling the performance of their servers and speeding critical, network-intensive applications such as backup, imaging, file/Web serving and groupware.”

In the medical IT environment, it’s imperative that data be rapidly updated and readily accessible. In addition, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) calls for strict data management requirements for health organizations. By enabling servers to efficiently process all network and storage protocols, Alacritech accelerators provide medical IT managers with a cost-effective, high performance solution for consolidating servers, significantly reducing back up windows and increasing network throughput to support rapidly growing electronic medical records.

Healthcare Organizations Leverage TOE for Maximum Efficiency
“At Erlanger Health System, we transfer extremely large medical imaging files and medical records and needed a way to significantly increase our network throughput while extending the life of our servers and desktops,” said John Haltom, network director, Erlanger Health System. “As a long-time Alacritech customer, we’ve achieved a phenomenal return on investment with Alacritech accelerators in our servers, and are now using Alacritech’s Windows 2003 drivers to achieve maximum server performance from our Microsoft Windows Server 2003 servers.”

“To efficiently manage our large amounts of critical medical data we needed to implement a networked storage strategy that would enable us to move from local tape backups to a centrally managed IP-based enterprise,” said Kevin Muha, technical lead, Network Server Group, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. “We now have over 100 Alacritech cards in our production servers, and we’re extremely pleased with our server performance and our nightly 5 terabyte backups.”

For more details on how Erlanger Health System and UPMC are benefiting from the use of Alacritech cards, please visit Alacritech's case studies.

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 patented 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.

Availability
Alacritech is shipping a complete line of Gigabit Ethernet and Fast Ethernet accelerator products based on SLIC Technology, its revolutionary data-path offload and acceleration architecture. Alacritech’s Gigabit Accelerator is available for $999 (copper version), and $1,399 (fiber version).

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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