San Jose, Calif. — August 18, 2003 — Alacritech®, Inc., the innovator of data acceleration solutions that enable the highest performance and efficiency in networked systems, today announced that its Accelerators are rapidly penetrating the digital content creation market. Leading newsrooms, post production houses and visual effects companies have recognized the value of integrating TCP/IP Offload Engine Network Interface Cards (TNICs) in their servers to cost-effectively increase system performance and content creator productivity in their data-intensive environments.

“Digital media environments place heavy demands on networked systems,” said Kim Peyser, senior vice president of sales and marketing, Alacritech, Inc. “Post production companies and high-profile newsrooms are incorporating Alacritech Accelerators to maximize system performance and improve organizational efficiency by eliminating bandwidth and scalability limitations.”

In networks used by digital content creators and teams making special effects for major motion pictures and television, technical directors require solutions that allow systems to efficiently handle large files. Post production houses also demand rapid delivery of large media files between servers, render farms and editing stations to meet shorter time-to-market deadlines. Alacritech Accelerators are ideally suited for the data delivery demands of digital content creation, freeing artists and producers from unnecessary network delays.

Leading Visual Effects Companies Benefit From TNICs
“Stargate Digital produces the visual effects for TV shows such as CSI:, ER and Third Watch, as well as television movies and feature films,” said Dr. Joseph Meier, CTO, Stargate Digital. “Our 2D and 3D digital content creators work on up to 15 visual effects projects simultaneously and under tight deadlines. Alacritech’s Accelerators significantly increased the performance of our servers to efficiently move data, so our graphic artists have the processing power they need, and the network servers aren’t burdened by the transfer of large video files.”

“We needed to find a cost-effective way to move our large amounts of graphics-intensive data through our two servers to our SAN,” said Joe De Michelis, information systems administrator, Rainmaker Limited Partnership. “After a careful cost/benefit analysis, we installed Alacritech Accelerators in our existing machines and saw throughput quadruple to 60MB/s in our production environment. The Alacritech Accelerators provide tremendous ROI as they enabled us to inexpensively maximize both our technical resources and our staff productivity.”

For more information on how Stargate Digital and Rainmaker Limited Partnership are benefiting from the use of Alacritech Accelerators, please visit our 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 Offload (DPO) architecture is designed to maximize server and storage performance and efficiency. All Alacritech products offer industry-standard failover and link aggregation.

Availability
Alacritech Accelerators are a complete line of Gigabit Ethernet and Fast Ethernet TNIC products based on SLIC Technology, Alacritech’s revolutionary DPO architecture. Alacritech Accelerators are available for $999 (copper version) or $1,399 (fiber version) each. Digital media products from leading companies such as Avid Technologies and Pinnacle Systems also ship with Alacritech Accelerators.

About Alacritech, Inc.
Alacritech, Inc., led by industry visionary Larry Boucher, was founded to provide data acceleration solutions that enable the highest performance and efficiency in networked systems. Today, Alacritech is the first and only supplier of TCP Offload Engine (TOE) Network Interface Card (TNIC) solutions. Alacritech’s complete line of high-performance server and storage accelerators is based on the company’s patented SLIC Technology to optimize data delivery in servers, network-attached storage and iSCSI storage devices. SLIC Technology, the first fully compatible and scalable TOE technology, is being delivered in the industry’s leading storage and server products. Alacritech is a privately held company based in San Jose, California. For more information about Alacritech and its products, please visit the company’s Web site at www.alacritech.com.

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