May 11, 2011

Due to “recent key business milestones, product accomplishments and customer opportunities,” Solarflare has announced its exit from the physical layer (PHY) business through the sale of the company’s 10GBASE-T assets to an unnamed merchant semiconductor company.

The deal will enable Solarflare’s existing 10GBASE-T customers to continue to use the company’s leading products, it said.

Terms of the sale have not yet been disclosed at this time.

“Our deal to sell the 10GBASE-T business is good for our current installed base of 10GBASE-T customers who will now benefit from having continued support for the best 10GBASE-T product on the market,” said Russell Stern, CEO at Solarflare.

“We have now reached critical mass. Solarflare will continue to build on its success in the 10GbE server adapter market by growing share in high frequency trading and HPC segments, and launching solutions targeting the virtualization and big data segments.”

According to Solarflare, its 10GbE adapters, in combination with its OpenOnload middleware, have created a compelling value proposition for high frequency traders by reducing latency and increasing message rates for TCP/IP traffic in market data feeds, while maintaining compatibility with customer applications and installed Ethernet and TCP/IP infrastructure.

Solarflare’s 10GbE adapter is built from the ground up and boasts of high-performance, low-latency, cut-through application performance. The adapter’s scalable vNIC architecture provides up to 2,048 protected interfaces to the host system that OpenOnload uses to map applications directly to the NIC hardware, the company added.

“Those same vNIC interfaces are also used to enable virtual machine application acceleration and CPU core scaling,” it said.

At the end of 2010, the Dell’Oro Group identified Solarflare as the fastest growing 10G server adapter company in a market segment.