Force10 Networks Sets Milestone as Customer Base Increases 170 Percent

Force10 Networks announced that its worldwide customer base increased 170 percent last year and now totals more than 100 customers. Driven by the rapidly increasing demand for more bandwidth and highly reliable performance, Force10 has captured more than 27 percent of the modular Layer 3 Ten Gigabit Ethernet market, according to the most recent Dell'Oro Ethernet switch report, while expanding its customer base across new vertical markets, including portals, energy services, the government and telecommunications service providers. "The Force10 E-Series has found widespread acceptance throughout the industry for its consistently reliable performance and unique ability to simplify multi-layer networks," said Andrew Feldman, vice president of marketing at Force10 Networks. "Increasingly, network operators are deploying the E-Series to leverage low cost Ethernet technology in advanced cluster computing architectures that deliver competitive advantages and higher revenue." Recently, Force10's customer growth has been driven in large part by the TeraScale E-Series, which leads the industry in density and reliability. With unmatched Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet densities, the TeraScale E-Series enables network operators to process more traffic on a single system, fundamentally altering network economics by reducing capital and operational expenditures. The unique combination of density and resiliency in the TeraScale E-Series is ushering in a new era of network economics that leverages cluster computing to reduce networking costs. Already, bandwidth and computing intensive industries are increasing revenue and gaining competitive advantages, such as productivity gains and faster customer response time, with cluster computing architectures. Deployments of the Force10 E-Series at NASA, Pennsylvania State University, the Cornell Theory Center, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Veritas DGC and Petroleum Geo-Services highlight the competitive advantages that can be gained from the use of reliable Ethernet technology in an architecture that pools computing resources. As the first line-rate 10 Gigabit Ethernet system in the industry, the Force10 E-Series ushered in a new concept of high performance Ethernet networking. Leveraging its expertise in high performance Ethernet, Force10 expanded its worldwide customer base over the last year to include deployments in vertical markets such as service providers, research and education environments, portals, media and entertainment, oil and gas services, and government. According to Dell'Oro Group, the 10 Gigabit Ethernet market will grow from $325.5 million in 2004 to $2.9 billion in 2009. As the average price per port continues to fall by as much as 40 percent year over year through 2007, Dell'Oro Group predicts 10 Gigabit Ethernet will move from backbones and data centers deeper into enterprise networks.