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Topspin Adds Support, Operations Heavyweights To Roster

Topspin Communications, on the heels of a breakout quarter in which the company shipped over 10,000 of its server switch ports for the first time, today announced that it has strengthened its customer support and operations capabilities with the addition of industry veterans Mike Connolly, vice president of customer support, and John Jacobson, vice president of operations, to its management team.

In its last fiscal quarter, Topspin reached a major company milestone, shipping over ten thousand ports of its industry-leading programmable Server Switch platforms to customers in the high performance computing, database clustering, and commercial Grid computing markets in conjunction with its tier one system vendor OEM partners.

"This milestone, a significant first in the company's history, illustrates the growing acceptance of Topspin's InfiniBand-based programmable server switches and VFrame server virtualization software as the foundation for Grid or utility computing deployments," said Krish Ramakrishnan, CEO of Topspin Communications. "With this rapid growth we are experiencing, we are committed to maintaining the highest levels of product quality and customer satisfaction. The addition of Mike and John to our roster allows us to continue a top notch quality of service for our valued customers and our strategic OEM partners."

Connolly brings to Topspin over 17 years of progressive experience in customer service and sustaining engineering management. He joins Topspin from Network Associates, where he was most recently vice president of global tier 3 support and global service readiness. Prior to Network Associates, Connolly spent nine years at Nortel Networks, originally joining via SynOptics in 1993.

"This is an exciting time to be joining Topspin," said Connolly. "Topspin has already set the bar very high for supporting our end user customers and OEM partners. I'm looking forward to raising that bar further as we expand our worldwide, world class service and support capabilities."

Jacobson was the founder and president of Beyond-the-Box Inc, a Silicon Valley-based provider of outsourced operations services to Topspin and other high-tech startups. Before Beyond-The-Box, he served as vice president of operations for Iospan Wireless and vice president of manufacturing for Jetfax Inc. Jacobson has a strong background in high volume manufacturing, and held various engineering and manufacturing positions within the Electronics Division of Ford Motor Company.

"Topspin has experienced a tremendous growth rate, ramping from zero volume to over 10,000 ports a quarter in just five quarters," said Jacobson. "We've established the right partnerships to help us manage this growth and I look forward to continuing this ramp while maintaining the highest levels of product quality."

Topspin has pioneered the concept of the programmable Server Switch, a purpose-built piece of data center infrastructure designed explicitly to build a high performance fabric out of industry standard servers, and interconnect that fabric with pools of I/O and storage resources on-demand to build customize-able "virtual servers" out of commodity components. The Server Switch complements prior data center technologies like the Network Switch pioneered in the 1980s by companies like Cisco Systems to interconnect users and shared network resources, like printers, into Local Area Networks (LANs), and the Storage Switch pioneered in the 1990s by companies, like Brocade Communications, to connect storage resources together into Storage Area Networks (SANs). Topspin's Server Switch has ramped from initial revenues to this 10,000 ports shipped in a quarter milestone in just five quarters, a very rapid rate when compared to these other switch products.