SANTA CLARA, Calif. – October 19, 2007 – Astute Networks, an industry-leader in the development of high performance networked storage solutions for mission-critical applications, received the Best Newcomer Product award from the AdvancedTCA Summit Conference in Santa Clara, California. The Best of Show Awards were announced and presented Wednesday, October 17, 2007 on the Expo Hall floor at the Santa Clara Convention Center.

Newly announced president and CEO of Astute Networks, Clark Masters and Mike Heumann, vice president of marketing and sales were on hand to receive the award from Ernie Bergstrom, president, Crystal Cube Consulting.

Astute Networks' Caspian storage blade was chosen by a panel of industry experts for its merits in three criteria including distinctiveness of the product, central use of AdvancedTCA, and technical and business application of the product.

"We are very honored to receive this award from a distinguished industry forum such as the AdvancedTCA Summit Conference. It validates the design decisions we made, and that the product we developed solves real problems for our customers," said Clark Masters, president and CEO of Astute Networks. "This really caps an exciting week for Astute Networks, as we publicly announced the Caspian storage blade on Tuesday, and have met with many key industry people here at the conference."

The awards panel was chaired by industry veteran Ernie Bergstrom who said, "It is always impressive to see leading edge technology coming to market. Judging them side-by-side can be challenging. The panel concluded rather easily though, that Astute Networks' design of a 10Gb iSCSI ATCA storage blade was not only a great idea, but was very well executed".

The Caspian ATCA storage blade is the first 10Gb iSCSI ATCA storage blade optimized for the telecom CO and MSC environments. The blade delivers the performance of Fibre Channel rack-mount storage with the density and deployment advantages of ATCA. Dramatic revenue increases per Telco frame are realized by reducing the footprint of external storage in ATCA systems, allowing a net increase in server blades per frame. In addition, equipment acquisition and deployment costs are significantly reduced by eliminating expensive HBAs and cables required to connect external storage. This pioneering design enables telecom carriers and NEPs to recognize the full benefit of migration from rack-mount servers to blades.

Astute Networks is a member of the PICMG, which publishes the specifications for AdvancedTCA. PICMG is a consortium of over 450 companies who collaboratively develop open specifications for high performance telecommunications and industrial computing applications. The members of the consortium have a long history of developing leading edge products for these industries.

About Astute Networks

Astute Networks develops industry-leading high performance networked storage solutions for mission-critical applications. Founded in April 2000 and headquartered in San Diego, Calif., Astute Networks is backed by venture capital firms including Tallwood Venture Capital, Sevin Rosen Funds, Scale Venture Partners, KeyNote Ventures, and U.S. Venture Partners. Additional information is available at www.astutenetworks.com.