INDUSTRY

Force10 Networks, the pioneer in Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet networking, today announced that Internet2 has selected the Force10 E-Series family of switch/routers for its Hybrid Optical and Packet Infrastructure (HOPI) project, which will serve as a model for tomorrow's high performance network architectures. Internet2 is building a national hybrid packet and optical network testbed to examine the requirements and performance of scalable next generation networks that combine the best of packet and optical technologies. Internet2's partnership with Force10 is a critical step in moving this initiative forward. "The HOPI Design Team sought to create a national infrastructure testbed facility that would provide us with the reliability, security and system bandwidth necessary to advance an entirely new amalgam of network architectures," said Rick Summerhill, Internet2's director of network research, architecture and technologies and HOPI Design Team co-chairperson. "The Force10 equipment will play a significant role in providing the network capacity and dynamic provisioning we need to successfully create and experiment with a hybrid network." In the near future, as bandwidth-intensive applications and resources become more prevalent, the Internet2 community will require greater bandwidth than is available on its nationwide 10 Gbps Abilene backbone today. Internet2 initiated the HOPI project as a part of its mission to design, develop and deploy advanced networking capabilities that meet the emerging needs of the research and education community while leveraging its existing network assets. The nationwide HOPI testbed will serve as a foundation for cutting-edge network experimentation and a model for the next-generation of Internet2's existing high performance packet-based Abilene network. The HOPI testbed will utilize facilities from the Abilene Network, the National LambdaRail (NLR) network, the MANLAN exchange point, and several regional optical networks. Over the next three months, Force10 equipment will be deployed into the HOPI nodes located in Seattle, Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles and in Washington D.C. This design will allow researchers and scientists from around the world to participate and experiment with new networking technologies such as dynamically provisioned bandwidth, circuit switched environments and new transport protocols. "To model future network architectures, it is necessary to utilize the most advanced tools available today, and the unmatched density, scalability and resiliency of E-Series make it an ideal choice for the hybrid packet and circuit switched national infrastructure testbed the Internet2 community is building," said Sachi Sambandan, Force10's vice president of engineering. "By studying these architectures today, we can offer research and education environments as well as enterprises insight into building scalable networks for tomorrow." The Force10 E-Series delivers industry-leading Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet densities and the unmatched resiliency that is required in high performance environments like HOPI. Located in each of the network nodes across the country, the Force10 E-Series will provide dense Gigabit Ethernet connectivity with 10 Gigabit Ethernet uplinks to Abilene and NLR. Leveraging the high Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet densities of the E-Series, the HOPI team can construct simplified network topologies that provide scalability to accommodate the future growth they require. The E-Series enables Internet2 and its members to model future network architectures and facilitate research within the scientific and educational communities, potentially translating the benefits of a hybrid network into greater return on network investment for enterprises at large. Over the last two years Force10 has significantly increased its presence in research and national laboratory environments, including the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the California Institute of Technology, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, Argonne National Laboratory and the Cornell Theory Center.