San Jose, Calif. — August 10, 2004 — Alacritech® Inc., the innovator of data acceleration solutions that enable the highest performance and efficiency in networked systems, today announced it has reached another milestone with the issuance of its 15th U.S. patent in the area of scalable networking. As the pioneer of TCP offload technologies, Alacritech has developed a broad patent position covering the fundamentals of network data placement, protocol offload and protocol acceleration. Alacritech’s comprehensive patent portfolio and proven SLIC Technology® architecture strongly position the company to address the enormous market opportunity for scalable networking through its new IP licensing initiative for partners.

“The computer industry is beginning to move toward new scalable networking technologies such as iSCSI, Microsoft Chimney and RDMA, and Alacritech’s vision and technical innovation in this area has enabled us to build a comprehensive patent portfolio,” said Larry Boucher, president and CEO, Alacritech Inc. “Last quarter, our royalties for operating systems technology constituted ten percent of our revenue. The licensing of our scalable networking technology is a growing, strategic part of our business and this new initiative will make our innovations more accessible to valued partners worldwide.”

First Scalable Architecture for Networking and Storage
Boucher and the Alacritech team were the first to envision a network protocol processing architecture that bypasses Moore’s Law and the limitations of processors to enable scalable, networked systems. Boucher founded Alacritech in 1997 to develop SLIC Technology, a scalable Data Path Offload (DPO) architecture that eliminates network processing bottlenecks, closes the I/O processing gap and enables the seamless convergence of networking and storage. Even as network speeds increase, SLIC Technology scales to address the performance and interconnect requirements of future networking and I/O initiatives. First to market, and well ahead of any competition, Alacritech’s SLIC Technology is now being adopted by the industry as the foundation for scalable networking initiatives.

Alacritech Intellectual Property
Alacritech has been issued fifteen U.S. patents to date, with numerous other U.S. and international patent applications pending. Alacritech is applying its new patents to accelerate the adoption of scalable networking and to extend the company’s leadership in network acceleration. Notable recent examples include:

• U.S. Pat. No. 6,757,746
  Obtaining a destination address to enable a network interface device to write network data without headers directly into host memory



• U.S. Pat. No. 6,697,868
  Protocol processing stack for use with intelligent network interface device



• U.S. Pat. No. 6,687,758
  Port aggregation for network connections that are offloaded to network interface devices



• U.S. Pat. No. 6,591,302
  Fast-Path apparatus for receiving data corresponding to a TCP connection



• U.S. Pat. No. 6,393,487
  Passing a communication control block to a local device such that a message is processed on the device

For more information on Alacritech technological developments and patent portfolio, please see http://www.alacritech.com/html/patents.html. For more information regarding licensing Alacritech intellectual property, please see http://www.alacritech.com/html/IP_Licensing.html or send email to iplicense@alacritech.com.

About Alacritech SLIC Technology®
Alacritech’s SLIC Technology is a Data Path Offload (DPO) architecture that is the first fully compatible and scalable architecture to offload network protocol processing including TCP/IP, RDMA and iSCSI from host software to silicon. By efficiently eliminating system and network bottlenecks and maximizing data movement through Ethernet-based networks, SLIC Technology significantly increases system, application and network performance and enables scalable networking to 10 Gigabit and beyond. All Alacritech Accelerator products are based on SLIC Technology and include Gigabit Ethernet and Fast Ethernet TNIC products, iSCSI controller products and IPP ASICs. All Alacritech products offer industry-standard failover and link aggregation.

About Alacritech, Inc.
Alacritech, Inc. is the world’s leading supplier of standards-based scalable networking technology and solutions that enable the highest performance and efficiency in networked systems. As the first to envision a dynamic network protocol processing architecture that enables systems to scale to address ever increasing data and network speeds, Alacritech developed and patented the SLIC Technology® architecture. Alacritech’s complete line of Accelerators, based on this architecture, optimize data delivery in servers, network-attached storage and iSCSI storage devices. SLIC Technology, the basis of industry-accepted TOE solutions, ships in storage and server products worldwide. 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.