BLADE Network Technologies Unveils Its Unified FabricArchitecture to Address Rapidly Growing Data Center Requirements

SANTA CLARA, CA -- (Marketwire) -- 02/04/10 -- BLADE Network Technologies, Inc. (BLADE), the trusted leader in data center networking, today introduced its Unified FabricArchitecture™ (UFA), the industry's fastest, smartest, most integrable and most proven fabric that will eliminate cost and complexity of deploying physical and virtual data center infrastructure. BLADE posted record results in 2009 and expects even stronger performance in 2010 as enterprises look to upgrade existing data center infrastructure and add new capacity.

"BLADE achieved record-breaking business performance in 2009 fueled by strong demand from the world's largest enterprises for our low-latency, low-power, lossless and low-cost Ethernet fabric switches, Advanced Fabric software and Smart Server Control software," said Vikram Mehta, president and CEO, BLADE Network Technologies. "As customers address their key issues in terms of unifying and simplifying their data center architectures, they are invariably concerned with vendor lock in, expense and anything that requires them to rip out and replace their existing systems. BLADE's Unified FabricArchitecture is a faster, virtual machine aware and proven data center networking platform that allows customers to tie together best-of-breed servers, storage, hypervisors and core networking systems. Our Unified FabricArchitecture and Rackonomics approach ensure that customers that have already invested billions of dollars in their data centers can take advantage of the best innovations in the industry and achieve the lowest possible cost of ownership for their IT infrastructure."

"This BLADE announcement is simultaneously timely and relevant as enterprises recognize the value of convergence at the network edge," said Steve O'Donnell, managing director and senior analyst, ESG (Enterprise Strategy Group) EMEA. "Modern network architects are leveraging the simplicity and cost effectiveness of modular top of rack designs to deliver flexible wire once solutions that do not need expensive and disruptive upgrades to their core LAN and SAN."

"Enterprise data centers worldwide are actively upgrading to 10 Gigabit Ethernet and implementing I/O virtualization for servers and storage but are concerned about preserving their existing IT investments," said Philip Dawson, vice president, Gartner. "A unified IP network fabric can serve to ensure that the data center network can deliver maximum business value and flexibility."

"Today's enterprise data center is pursuing dual yet potentially conflicting goals to unify their server, storage and networking environment and to avoid tying their fortunes to a single vendor," said John Abbott, chief analyst, The 451 Group. "BLADE's Unified FabricArchitecture provides an independent network platform that enables the enterprise data center to achieve unification without vendor lock-in."

BLADE's Unified FabricArchitecture

BLADE's UFA brings together some of the industry's most proven technology and IT elements into a very compelling solution. These elements include:

1. BLADEOS™ -- The world's most widely deployed data center fabric OS
   with 7.5 million ports in production deployment. Over 9,500 enterprises
   in the world have deployed this fabric OS in their data centers,
   including 350 of the Fortune 500 companies. The company's customers
   include -- 7 of the top 10 companies in the Global 500 list, 5 of the
   top 10 media companies, 13 of the world's top 25 banks, 4 of the world's
   top 10 telecommunications companies, 6 of the top 10 global electronics
   companies, one of the world's largest stock exchanges that conducts over
   $30 trillion in annual trade over this fabric, the world's largest
   Ethernet supercomputer cluster and the market-leading and largest
   Internet search engine in China.

2. VMready™ -- Network virtualization extensions to BLADEOS that make
   it ideally suited for customers who are deploying server virtualization
   in their data centers. BLADE's VMready is hypervisor agnostic, does not
   require customers to upgrade to the latest version of hypervisor
   software and ships standard with every 10GE blade switch. This software
   stack lies at the heart of some of the world's largest virtual server
   deployments including Centre Hospitalier d'Avignon -- a public health
   care organization providing health care to people for over 600 years.

3. vNIC™ -- Converged fabric extensions to BLADEOS that allow customers
   to converge their LAN, SAN and management networks onto a single wire.
   vNIC is open and supports everything from mainframes to rack optimized
   servers to tower systems to purpose built application appliances (e.g.
   data warehousing, security, etc.) from multiple vendors.

4. Smart Server Control™ -- The industry's most sophisticated server
   control and CMDB software that presently provides environmental,
   configuration, I/O and provisioning control for over one million blade
   servers deployed in data centers around the world.

5. FabricHarmony™ -- Data center fabric element management software that
   allows customers to effectively manage the BLADE data center fabric
   elements and cohesively integrate them into a data center-wide
   management system of their choice (IBM Tivoli, HP OpenView, CA
   UniCenter, HP OpsWare, IBM Director, etc.).

6. High reliability -- The fabric of a data center is critical to system
   and data center uptime. The actual measured MTBF on BLADE's data center
   fabric elements is well over 3 million hours.

7. Data center focus -- Unlike most other networking vendors, BLADE is
   singularly focused on the data center fabric market. As a result, BLADE
   has created the world's best Ethernet data center fabric as measured by
   performance and throughput, latency, loss characteristics and
   price-performance.[http://www.bladenetwork.net/userfiles/file/PDFs
   /Tolly209115BladeG8124Performance.pdf].

8. Partnerships -- BLADE recognizes that customers want their problems
   solved but don't wish to be held hostage by closed and proprietary
   systems from a single vendor. As a result, BLADE has designed its
   fabric to be open, to embrace existing and new systems and allow
   customers to take advantage of the best innovations available in
   the market that deliver the lowest cost of ownership.

BLADE's Unified FabricArchitecture Technology Roadmap

This powerful roadmap takes BLADE's UFA well into this decade and includes:

1. Silicon innovations -- with the industry's leading providers of merchant
   switch silicon to embed functions in an ASIC that will enable customers
   to improve the performance and efficiency of network and I/O intensive
   applications such as security, data warehousing and rich media (HD/3D)
   content distribution.

2. Rack infrastructure -- rapid provisioning and control -- BLADE is
   actively working to add extensions to its Smart Server Control software
   to provide environmental, configuration, I/O and provisioning control
   for different server form factors in a multi-vendor environment.

3. Extreme reliability -- BLADE will extend its reliability advantages into
   innovations that will dramatically reduce the operating expense
   associated with data center infrastructure.

4. 40GE and 100GE innovations -- BLADE is working to enhance the
   performance of its fabric products to 40GE and 100GE speeds and extend
   the scaling characteristics of its fabric through the implementation of
   the Distributed Fabric Protocol (DFP), a BLADE invention.

5. Expanded eco-system of partners -- BLADE is actively working with other
   technology vendors in the industry to enhance the applicability,
   performance, and functionality of UFA for specific vertical applications
   that will be deployed on "private" or "public" cloud infrastructures.

About BLADE Network Technologies

BLADE Network Technologies (BLADE) is the industry's leading provider of network fabrics for high-performance data centers. Its blade switches, top-of-rack RackSwitch™, VMready™ network virtualization software and Smart Server Control™ software are key elements of the company's Unified FabricArchitecture™. BLADE's "Rackonomics" approach makes it simple for businesses to rapidly deploy and configure massive amounts of server and storage infrastructure, interconnect the various infrastructure elements, virtualize the infrastructure to maximize efficiency and utilization and easily manage the infrastructure to achieve the most optimal TCO. With 7.5 million ports in production deployment, BLADE's proven fabric products connect millions of server and storage systems at over 9,500 enterprises in over 26 different industry verticals, including 350 of the Fortune 500. Visit: http://www.bladenetwork.net. Twitter: @BLADENetwork.

BLADE Network Technologies, the BLADE logo, BLADEHarmony, BLADEOS, FabricHarmony, RackSwitch, RackSwitch Solution Partner, SmartConnect, Smart Server Control, VMready, vNIC, NMotion and Unified FabricArchitecture are trademarks of BLADE Network Technologies. All other names or marks are property of their respective owners.

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