Silicom announced that its quad-port Gigabit Ethernet Server Adapters have been selected by a storage company as a standard component in its state-of-the-art new virtualization appliances. Silicom's robust adapters will be used to enhance the throughput of the appliance as required in high-traffic and mission critical environments, and to prevent I/O bottlenecks at the appliance level.

Virtualization appliances are an innovative solution for the IT department's need to be able to change the configuration of complex Storage Area Networks (SAN) or Network Attached Storage (NAS) without disrupting system availability. The virtualization appliance separates the logical and physical representation of storage resources, independently managing the relationships in order to free the main system from the task. The concept of virtualization is being embraced throughout the IT community as a potent trend with the potential to improve performance, enhance flexibility and reduce costs.

"Virtualization is on the rise as a significant market trend, and the emergence of Virtualization Appliances is good news for Silicom," said Shaike Orbach, Silicom's President and CEO. "Our role is to provide the technology needed to assure a high level of throughput, preventing I/O bottlenecks and other roadblocks that can limit an appliance's performance. In installation after installation, our innovative cards have proven their ability to 'unclog' the pipes, resulting in an appliance that continues to work at top speed in all environments.

"This order validates the need for our server adapters in Virtualization appliances and gives us an important entry point into the Virtualization arena. This has the potential to become a significant market for Silicom as we believe that more and more virtualization appliances will be launched by additional companies over time."