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For Immediate Release:
San Jose, February 28, 2008

Release Offers Most Significant Introduction of New Technologies Since FreeBSD 5.0

The FreeBSD Project announced today the release of FreeBSD Version 7.0. FreeBSD 7.0 promises to be the release system administrators have long been waiting for, and includes numerous improvements for enhanced networking, security, multimedia, and storage. FreeBSD 7.0 offers the first official implementation of the highly-scalable ZFS file system outside of Solaris. Also significant in this release are SMP and kernel scheduler improvements that enhance performance and the introduction of "gvirstor", the FreeBSD GEOM Storage Virtualization Layer.

Other highlights of the FreeBSD 7.0 release include:

• GEOM virtual storage device

• GEOM file system-independent journaling

• GEOM storage failover between multiple devices

• TSO (TCP Segmentation Offload) and LRO (Large Receive Offload) support for several network drivers with performance increased by 25% to 108%

• New optimized sendfile (2) implementation and other TCP/IP optimizations

• TCP buffer auto scaling for improved transfer rates

• Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol (RSTP; 802.1w)

• Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP)

• Link aggregation and link failover interface from OpenBSD

• Interrupt filtering

• Linux 2.6 binary compatibility

• New ULE 2.0/3.0 scheduler

• Improved accounting file format

• New efficient memory file-system, tmpfs, from NetBSD

• Solaris and Mac OS X compatible fine-grained and configurable security event auditing for live system monitoring, intrusion detection, and postmortem analysis.

• New fine-grained root privilege separation capabilities

• A new more-scalable concurrent malloc (3) implementation for improved performance (jemalloc)

"FreeBSD 7.0 is a truly stellar release, bringing to fruition our 8-year SMPng project and blowing away the competition on multi-processor database performance," says Robert Watson, FreeBSD Core Team Member. "It isn't just about databases, though: with network features including the reference SCTP implementation, a parallel directly-dispatched network stack, vendor-supported and vendor-optimized 10gbps network drivers, and storage features such as iSCSI and ZFS, this is an incredible release -- and one that we're very proud of."

"FreeBSD7 really gives Linux a run for the money," says Matt Olander, CTO of iXsystems and a member of the FreeBSD Public Relations Team. "The new scheduler and SMP improvements in FreeBSD 7 provide major performance enhancements for popular applications like the MySQL database server and BIND DNS services."

FreeBSD 7.0 is also earning rave reviews from technical experts running companywide networks on FreeBSD. According to Josef Grosch, IT Technical Lead at Juniper Networks, "One of the things I do at Juniper Networks is track and evaluate FreeBSD development. We have a fair number of servers with very large file systems, over 700 gig. ZFS will really help us manage these file systems and go a long way toward eliminating the 12 hour fsck. We are also really looking forward to using the new scheduler and improved SMP capabilities. In our environment, build time is critical. My testing with 7.0 on a 4 way box has shown a large increase in speed. We are really looking forward to using FreeBSD 7.x, I think it will be a large step forward for FreeBSD."

About The FreeBSD Project
FreeBSD is an advanced operating system for x86 compatible, amd64 compatible, ARM, IA-64, PC-98, and UltraSPARC architectures. It is derived from BSD, the version of UNIX developed at the University of California, Berkeley. FreeBSD is one of the most used UNIX-like operating systems in the world and is widely renowned as the most stable and secure server operating system. Furthermore, because the source code for FreeBSD is generally available and benefits from an unrestricted licensing system, it can be customized for a variety of special applications and projects in ways not generally possible with most other operating systems. The development of FreeBSD is an open, flexible process, taken from the contributions of hundreds of people around the world.

About iXsystems
iXsystems, Inc. is a leading provider of high-performance computing clusters, blade servers, rackmount servers, and storage solutions to the global marketplace. iXsystems supplies FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Linux servers to a wide cross-section of industries. iXsystems also supports and maintains the PC-BSD project. The company is headquartered in San Jose, CA.

For more information:
Denise Ebery, iXsystems
Phone: (408)943-4100
Visit the website: www.iXsystems.com
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