RDMA Consortium Completes All Specifications Needed for Implementation of First Generation Hardware and Solutions; Finalizes Version 1.0 of Verbs Specification

April 29, 2003 – The RDMA Consortium today announced completion of version 1.0 of the Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) Protocol Verbs specification. The completed Verbs specification accompanies the RDMA wire-protocol suite which was completed in October 2002. The specifications are suitable for first-generation industry implementations of RDMA over TCP solutions and complete the information required for RDMA hardware development. The Verbs specification describes the behavior of RDMA hardware and software. The RDMA Consortium’s Verbs provide applications with architectural alignment to other available RDMA verbs specifications. Additional information about the Verbs specification and the overall benefits of RDMA is available at rdmaconsortium.org.

The consortium continues to work on additional protocol specifications to broaden usage of the RDMA protocol suite and is actively encouraging participation, contribution and review from additional technology companies. Additional specifications are expected to be completed in the third quarter of 2003.

Founded by Adaptec, Inc. (Nasdaq: ADPT), Broadcom Corporation (Nasdaq: BRCM), Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO), Dell (Nasdaq: DELL), EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), HP (NYSE: HPQ), IBM (NYSE: IBM), Intel Corporation (Nasdaq: INTC), Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) and Network Appliance, Inc. (Nasdaq: NTAP), the RDMA Consortium is an independent consortium formed to develop the architectural specifications necessary to implement products that provide RDMA over TCP/IP networks, including Ethernet-based networks. These specifications will help organizations meet increasing demands for networking bandwidth and speed that are currently growing faster than the processing power and memory bandwidth of the compute nodes that process networking traffic.

The RDMA over TCP protocol provides more efficient and scalable computing while leveraging existing, industry-standard Ethernet infrastructures. Since the RDMA protocol can place data directly into its final memory destination, system processors and memory are available for more useful work. With the improved efficiency and performance of RDMA enabled NICs (RNICs), applications are better able to scale by sharing tasks across the network as opposed to centralizing work in larger, more expensive systems. More efficient networking also offers the opportunity to converge functions in the data center over fewer types of interconnects.

About the RDMA Consortium

The RDMA Consortium is an open industry forum chartered to develop architectural specifications necessary to implement products that provide RDMA technology over TCP/IP. Additional information about the RDMA Consortium, membership information, contacts for founding companies and other materials can be found at http://www.rdmaconsortium.org.

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