Foundry Networks, a performance and total solutions leader for end-to-end switching and routing, today announced it will provide the Egyptian Universities Network (EUN) and the Egyptian National Scientific and Technical Information Network (ENSTINET) with the backbone networking solution for their sixteen universities and nine research institutes. The EUN and ENSTINET have grown to more than 4 million students and employees in recent years driving the demand for a high performance and resilient solution for connecting their 25 distributed locations. After extensive vendor and product analysis, the EUN and the ENSTINET determined Foundry Networks' award winning switches and routers to be the most effective solution available to accomplish this scale of infrastructure enhancement. "After a meticulous examination of multiple vendors' offerings, we determined that Foundry's solutions are ideal for our large-scale network upgrade," said Mostafa AbdelWahed, director of telecom infrastructure for the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT). "Foundry Networks has the performance, flexibility, and quality we require to operate in an extremely demanding and geographically dispersed infrastructure that supports over 4 million users." Foundry Networks' BigIron product line offers the EUN and ENSTINET the latest networking technology based on Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6), wire-speed 10 Gigabit Ethernet configurations and incorporates IP network security solutions, including, but not limited to, wire speed access control list (ACL), denial of service (DoS) protection, and network monitoring with standards based sFlow. The BigIron 15000's unparalleled port density maximizes revenue per rack unit (RU) by minimizing the environmental requirements such as space, power and cooling. Scale up to 232 Gigabit Ethernet ports, 28 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports, or 672 10/100 ports in a single modular system with a total size of 17 rack units. "Foundry's solutions will provide the EUN/ENSTINET with a cost-effective and highly scalable integrated network that delivers reliable performance for their current and future traffic and application demands," said Bob Schiff, vice president and general manager for Foundry's enterprise business unit. "The EUN/ENSTINET network is an excellent example of how demanding customers worldwide rely on Foundry solutions for their high-performance and high-availability networking needs." The EUN was established in 1987 to facilitate the communication between the Egyptian universities and provide additional resources to geographically distributed staff and students. The EUN's objective is to improve the higher education system and develop a center of excellence in the field of information and informatics. The EUN is anticipated to emerge as the leading provider of information and knowledge for the Egyptian society and become the role model for information networks endorsed and certified by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Prior to Foundry's networking solutions, the EUN connected the Egyptian academic community to the international community through the European Academic & Research Network [EARN].