NetXen was founded in February 2002 as Universal Network Machines to develop high-performance networking and protocol processing solutions. The company has received funding from Accel Partners, Benchmark Capital, and Integral Capital Partners.

In servers, the transition to 10GbE is being driven by the rise of converged IP-based interconnect fabrics that combine networking, clustering and storage (represented by TCP/IP, iWarp and iSCSI, respectively) on a single pipe. However, just the TCP/IP processing overhead implied by these protocols can saturate multiple CPUs, leaving no cycles for application processing. Additionally, RDMA protocols like iWarp require extremely low processing latency, which cannot be assured with host-based processing.

Furthermore, many of today’s protocols (including TCP/IP) are in a constant state of evolution. Today’s host CPU-based solutions can handle multiple protocols in a 1 Gigabit environment, but at 10 Gigabit speeds, in combination with multiple virtual NICs, each of which supports multiple protocols, this method will not work.

To address this challenge, NetXen has developed the Intelligent NIC, which is claimed to be the first programmable, multi-protocol networking solution designed for volume 10GbE markets. The Intelligent NIC silicon and board-level products are based on the patented NetXen chip architecture, which delivers advanced capabilities for the next generation of server networking, substantially improving datacenter performance and agility. With its patented architecture, NetXen’s Intelligent NIC increases datacenter network performance by a factor of 10 and system power efficiency by 50%, at less than half the cost of current solutions.

The NetXen Intelligent NIC products are claimed to be the first dual-port 10 Gigabit solutions on the market, and the first to offer native PCI-Express (PCIe) support. They support a range of functionality, including Layer 2 NIC, TCP/IP, iSCSI, iWarp (RDMA), I/O Virtualization, and Security. They are software- and firmware-upgradeable, unlike existing hardwired solutions, and claimed to be the only solution on the market whose functionality can be changed completely in firmware.

NetXen’s Intelligent NIC family consists of both silicon and board-level solutions. Silicon solutions include the NX2031 with dual 10GbE and dual GbE, and the NX2035 with dual 10GbE and quad GbE. Board solutions include 10GbE, low-profile PCIe 8x cards with pluggable XFP SR optics, pluggable XFP LR optics, or integrated CX4 as well as the Quad GbE, half-size PCIe 8x card with copper PHY.

The chips and boards are built around NetXen’s custom High-Performance Protocol Processing Engine (PPE). The PPE is a hybrid compute element; it is a general purpose processing engine that is highly optimized for data sequencing operations that typically present themselves in the I/O domain. The PPE has an extremely efficient, highly parallel architecture that provides state machine-like throughput for I/O processing tasks with the advantage of being fully programmable.

The PPE’s high instruction throughput, low latency and low power consumption make it ideal for network I/O applications and forms the basis of NetXen’s Intelligent NIC product portfolio. Advanced features include full TCP/IP offload, iSCSI acceleration, and RDMA support with full iWarp compliance. The high-performance NIC mode features checksum offload, large send offload, receive side scaling, Jumbo Frames, 802.1p/q, and more.

NetXen’s protocol- and OS-agnostic Intelligent NICs are designed for volume 10 Gigabit deployments and are targeted at server, storage, security and networking systems. Intelligent NIC products are available now. Top-tier system suppliers, including HP and IBM, plan to incorporate NetXen’s Intelligent NIC technology in products currently under development.

Govind Kizhepat, Founder and CEO (previously an entrepreneur in residence at Benchmark Capital, EVP of Globespan and founder, Chairmand and CEO of iCompression, which was acquired by Globespan)

David Pulling, President (previously an EVP of ServerWorks, which was acquired by Broadcom)

Zubair Hussain, VP of Hardware Development and Operations (previously VP of engineering at Nemo, a specialized memory company acquired by Cisco, and VP of engineering at Chelsio)

Vikram Karvat, Senior Director of Marketing (previously director of marketing at Broadcom)