Solarflare Communications, the leading provider of standards-compliant 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) silicon, today announced that it has secured an additional $26 million in equity financing. This round of funding includes participation from previous investors, such as Oak Investment Partners, Foundation Capital, Accel Partners and Amadeus Capital Partners.
Solarflare has been shipping the industry’s first and only full-performance 10GBASE-T product since September 2006. Moreover, the company has been shipping the industry’s lowest-power 10GbE vNIC controller and MAC chip since February 2007. Solarflare will use the equity financing to ramp up its next-generation products, including the industry’s lowest-power 10GBASE-T PHY, and boost the volume of production in the 10GbE market.
“With the ever increasing deployment of rich media on demand and server virtualization, enterprises and data centers need robust, standards-compliant 10 Gigabit solutions that are power-efficient and allow for simple upgrades of current Ethernet infrastructures,” said Russell Stern, chief executive officer of Solarflare. “Solarflare is the only company shipping both 10GBASE-T PHYs and 10GbE controllers. We lead the market and have design traction with multiple customers. This latest round of funding signifies our investors’ continued confidence in Solarflare’s ability to execute and grow in this competitive market.”
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reports with the current trend, national energy consumption by servers and data centers could nearly double by 2011 to more than 100 billion kWh, representing a $7.4 billion annual electricity cost.1 “Solarflare’s 10GbE products enable a whole new energy-efficiency paradigm, based on ubiquitous 10GBASE-T fabrics, where computing resources is allocated dynamically within data centers locally and between data centers globally. This matches server workloads to power consumption and also moves application processing and server workloads to locations with greener, more efficient power generations from such sources as wind, solar or water,” stated Professor Andy Hopper, fellow of Corpus Christi College and head of the computer laboratory at the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
Solarflare’s recent funding round will support high-volume shipments of its 10 Gigabit Ethernet controller and 10GBASE-T PHY technology enabling switch, storage and server original design manufacturers (ODMs) and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) worldwide to build standards-compliant 10GbE products for enterprises and data centers. This latest investment brings the total amount raised by Solarflare to over $126 million in six years.