Spokane, Washington (May 26, 1998) - Packet Engines Incorporated, a leading provider of gigabit networking solutions, today announced that it has entered into an agreement with ZNYX Corporation, a pioneer in providing scalable and reliable network solutions for servers, workstations and desktops. Under the terms of the agreement, Packet Engines will bundle ZNYX’s RAINlink™ software for Microsoft Windows™ NT with Packet Engines’ industry-leading G-NIC™ Gigabit Ethernet network interface card (NIC). With this agreement, Packet Engines is the first company to ship failover, load balancing and server-trunking capabilities in a Gigabit Ethernet NIC solution. As a result, Packet Engines’ customers will benefit from new levels of reliability and performance across their networks.

"High-end servers increasingly handle crucial enterprise resource management and financial transactions. A single point of failure or overloaded server link is not acceptable when million-dollar business operations are at stake," said Justin Smith, senior analyst at IDC. "ZNYX's RAINlink software addresses this emerging need. In this case, RAINlink promises to provide Packet Engines’ power customers the fault tolerance capabilities they will require of their Gigabit Ethernet server connections."

"We are very pleased to be working with Packet Engines," said Connie Austin, president and CEO, ZNYX Corporation. "Together, we can deliver interoperable and resilient solutions for corporate backbones and servers. ZNYX's expertise in fault-tolerant network solutions is complementary to Packet Engines' gigabit networking solutions."

ZNYX's RAINlink software minimizes network downtime and relieves network bottlenecks by enabling automatic failover, link aggregation (trunking), and dynamic load balancing for server NICs. Failover enables a standby NIC to take over following a primary NIC connection failure – in less than 500 milliseconds. Link aggregation combines multiple active network links between NICs into one or more trunks to provide scalable bandwidth, while offering increased availability. Dynamic load balancing distributes two-way traffic evenly across aggregated ports to avoid bandwidth saturation.

"Our association with ZNYX Corporation is a logical fit with Packet Engines’ goal of providing the industry’s most reliable, high-performance network solutions," said Bernard Daines, president and CEO of Packet Engines. "The G-NIC, coupled with ZNYX’s RAINlink software, enables network managers to optimize server availability and throughput."

The G-NIC is a 64-bit PCI adapter designed for 32-bit and 64-bit PCI bus computers. A wide range of features maximize performance and host central processing unit availability in high-end servers and workstations. The G-NIC offers the industry’s broadest driver support including Novell NetWare, Windows 95, Windows NT, Solaris, DEC UNIX, SGI IRIX, LINUX and FreeBSD.

ZNYX Corporation, a privately held company headquartered in Fremont, California specializes in bringing continuous availability and improved performance to network systems, while preserving the existing network infrastructure. ZNYX’s focus is to deliver innovative, cost-effective solutions for high availability computing systems to make network interfaces faster and more reliable. Using its Redundant Array of Independent Netports (RAIN) technology, ZNYX designs and manufactures a family of PCI and CompactPCI Fast Ethernet adapters (NetBlaster), switching adapters (RAINswitch ) and link aggregation solutions (RAINcluster, RAINlink). Information about ZNYX products is available at http://www.znyx.com.

Packet Engines Incorporated was founded by Bernard Daines in 1994 to develop networking solutions delivering gigabit performance and enterprise reliability. The company, a founding member of the Gigabit Ethernet Alliance, is now providing high-performance gigabit networking solutions directly and via a variety of industry partners. Packet Engines' products include high-performance routing switches, hubs, network interface cards and intellectual property licenses. Visit www.packetengines.com for additional information.