News and Events

2005

FORCE10 NETWORKS DEPLOYED BY BAIDU.COM TO POWER CHINA’S LARGEST SEARCH ENGINE NETWORK; WORLD’S SIXTH MOST VISITED WEBSITE RELIES ON RESILIENCY OF TERASCALE E-SERIES

MILPITAS, Calif., September 26, 2005 — Force10 Networks today announced that Baidu.com (NASDAQ: BIDU), China’s largest search engine, has deployed the TeraScale E-Series at the core of its data centers to increase network capacity today and build in the long-term scalability that will accommodate future growth. Leveraging the high density and resiliency of the Force10 TeraScale E-Series, Baidu.com is increasing predictable performance and simplifying its network to reduce total cost of ownership.

“As the world’s sixth most visited web site and the second most visited website in China, Baidu requires the high density and resiliency that the TeraScale E-Series offers to more efficiently provide answers to an increasing number of searches,” said Mark Cooper, senior vice president of worldwide sales at Force10 Networks. “With the TeraScale E-Series at the foundation of its network, Baidu has the scalability to support long-term growth as more of China’s population comes online.”

The Force10 TeraScale E1200 is providing the high density Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet density Baidu requires to connect thousands of servers within its multiple data centers. Within each data center, Baidu is leveraging the high Gigabit Ethernet density of the TeraScale E-Series to connect its serves while 10 Gigabit Ethernet connects each data center, ensuring a highly available, congestion-free network.

Supporting an industry-leading 672 line-rate Gigabit and 56 line-rate 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports, the TeraScale E-Series enables Baidu to process more search requests on a single system. With fewer systems, Baidu is conserving space in its data centers, enabling it to increase its search capacity by deploying more servers. Additionally, fewer systems reduce operating costs such as maintenance, support, power and cooling. The high density of the Force10 TeraScale E-Series, coupled with robust Layer 2 and Layer 3 functionality, also enables Baidu to reduce the complexity of its network by collapsing the routing, core switching and access layers into a single layer.

Search engines and portals like Baidu, are on the cutting edge of a new economy, leveraging cost-effective high performance computing networks to quickly provide Internet users with answers. This answer economy is driven by the emergence of new architectures that enable enterprises to cost effectively leverage the aggregate computing power of servers. Further enabling this new economy are resilient, high density Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet systems, like the Force10 TeraScale E-Series, that provide the high performance connectivity between servers.

China ranks second in the world with 103 million Internet users, more than half of which use broadband. According to iResearch, the number of Internet search users in China is projected to grow to 187 million in 2007.

Contact:
Peter Ruzicka
Force10 Networks Inc.
408-965-5151
pruzicka@force10networks.com

Contact:
Jennifer Arculeo
Force10 Networks Inc.
408-965-5194
jarculeo@force10networks.com

About Force10 Networks
Force10 Networks is the pioneer in building and securing high performance networks. Based on a revolutionary system architecture that delivers best-in-class resiliency and massive scalability, Force10’s TeraScale E-Series switch/routers ensure predictable application performance, increase network availability, and reduce operating costs. Today, many of the world’s largest Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks depend on Force10 Networks. For additional information, please visit www.force10networks.com.

Force10 Networks and E-Series are registered trademarks, and P-Series, S-Series, TeraScale and FTOS are trademarks of Force10 Networks, Inc. All other company names are trademarks of their respective holders.