Alacritech Inc. is unveiling two server network interface cards the company says can deliver eight times the performance of traditional adapters. The company’s session layer interface card technology competes mainly against Intel products and is aimed at users who want to boost the performance of their Web, network or application servers. Unlike traditional cards, which act solely as packet transfer devices, Alacritech’s two- and four-port cards have processors that off-load network-related processing tasks from the server to increase overall network performance. The PCI cards now support Windows NT-based servers. Alacritech is working on support for Linux servers and plans to support others later this year. The first products will be two- and four-port 10/100 Ethernet server adapters aimed at enterprise users, system integrators and computer OEMs. Alacritech Ethernet server adapters come bundled with up to 8MB of onboard RAM for protocol processing and buffering. The products support NT and conform to the PCI 2.2 specification for 64-bit devices for operation in either 32- or 64-bit PCI environments. The two-port cards cost US$299 and the four-port cards cost $599. Alacritech, of San Jose, Calif., http://www.alacritech.com.
Prices listed are in US currency.