INTERCONNECTS

Foundry Networks today announced the BigIron RX-series high-performance layer 2/3 Ethernet switches. The BigIron RX switch family incorporates the latest advancements in switch fabric design, system redundancy and traffic management to enable the next generation of scalable, secure, and high-availability networking solutions. The BigIron RX-series provides a flexible, scalable and fully redundant high-performance solution for a wide range of environments including enterprise backbones, data centers, high-performance computing and service provider networks. In recognition of the BigIron RX-series' advanced and innovative design, it has been selected as a Best of Interop Finalist in the Network Infrastructure category at the 2005 Interop tradeshow opening here this week. The BigIron RX-series family includes three chassis models, each supporting redundant management, redundant switch fabric and redundant power supply components. The BigIron RX-4 is a compact four rack unit (RU) high switch. It supports four half-slot port modules and has a switching capacity of 384 gigabits per second (Gbps). The BigIron RX-8 is seven rack units in height, supports eight half-slot port modules and has a switching capacity of 768 gigabits per second. The BigIron RX-16 is fourteen rack units in height supports, sixteen half-slot port modules and has a switching capacity of 1.536 terabits per second. With its low profile design, the BigIron RX-16 switch can be stacked three high in a single seven-foot rack providing for as many as 192 wire-speed 10-GE ports. High performance environments including Internet exchanges and High Performance Computing installations will be able to take advantage of this massive density and horsepower. "Second generation 10-GE solutions developed in the early 2000's helped launch 10-GE as a strategic and enabling technology for both enterprises and service providers," said Bobby Johnson, Chairman and CEO of Foundry Networks. "To really accelerate and move 10-GE into the mainstream a new generation of switching is required, one that leverages the latest advances in network processors, switch designs and system architecture. The BigIron RX-series integrates state-of-the-art technologies in a family of fully redundant switches to deliver to our customers a compelling solution for building scalable, reliable and convergence-enabled networks that are truly ready for the future." Redundant and Resilient Design To ensure business continuity in the event of equipment failures, the BigIron RX switches are designed with no single point of system failure. The BigIron RX architecture supports redundant common equipment for all three chassis models. The BigIron RX-4 and RX-8 support 2:1 switch fabric redundancy and the BigIron RX-16 supports 3:1 switch fabric redundancy. All three models support 1:1 redundancy for the management module and N+1 redundancy for the power module. Even in the event of multiple fabric module failures, the BigIron RX switch will continue to operate, but at a reduced capacity. The BigIron RX is the only switch solution in the industry that can tolerate multiple fabric module failures in this fashion. The BigIron RX also supports in-service software upgrades allowing the network operator to perform software updates without disrupting the operation of the network. In addition to module redundancy, the BigIron RX switches support a number of other design features to maintain continuous operation. All field serviceable components, including the management modules, interface modules, switch fabric modules, power supplies, and fans are hot-swappable. In addition, each interface module has a temperature sensor. The sensor is used to control the system's fan speed and airflow. If the maximum temperature threshold is exceeded for a module, it will be disabled by the system to avoid disrupting switch operation. To protect against memory corruption, the BigIron RX management modules use ECC SDRAM to auto-detect and correct memory errors. These features, together with the layer 2/3 resiliency protocols help ensure maximum uptime for networks built using BigIron RX switches. IronWare Layer 2/3 Networking Intelligence The BigIron RX-series will ship with IronWare layer 2/3 networking software and IronShield security, providing a secure, feature-rich and proven set of standards-based Ethernet switching, IPv4 and IPv6 unicast and multicast routing. BigIron RX systems can scale to support large environments with extensive capacities in key areas including the BGP routing information base (RIB), the number of hardware-switched IP routes, MAC addresses, access control lists (ACL), traffic policers and more. The system supports up to 500 BGP peers and one million BGP routes in its software routing information base (RIB) and 512,000 routes in the port module's hardware forwarding information base (FIB). Packet forwarding is performed by these pre-populated forwarding engines. This design provides for very low latency and wire-speed performance for all packets in a flow. Unmatched Scalability and Bandwidth Density The BigIron RX-series switch family is the densest Ethernet switching solution in the industry, capable of delivering 110 Gbps throughput per rack unit. This is 70% higher than its closest competitor. The switch fabric in all three models delivers 96 Gbps full-duplex, non-blocking capacity per full-width module slot and 48 Gbps per half-slot. A module carrier configured in a full-height slot accommodates two half-height port modules. In the future, a full-height line module may be configured into the 96 Gbps slot simply by removing the module carrier. The BigIron RX is the only switch family that ships both 40-GE-ready and 100-GE ready. This scalability provides network operators with significant investment protection for the future. The half-slot design allows for graceful growth from as little as twenty-four ports of 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet to sixty-four ports of 10-GE. Clos Switch with Adaptive Self-Routing and Virtual Output Queue Architecture Deliver Non-blocking Performance, Low Latency, Fault Tolerance and Quality of Service At the heart of the BigIron RX architecture is a single-stage, adaptive self-routing Clos switch fabric with virtual output queuing (VOQ) and distributed packet scheduling. The Clos design allows for a consistent and redundant architecture for all three switch models using a common switch fabric element. The Clos switch architecture provides very low packet latency and jitter and allows for future scalability using multi-stage designs. The switch's adaptive self-routing capability provides for a more scalable solution than architectures that rely on centralized packet schedulers. Additionally, it provides for routing around backplane failures such as electrical faults and fair utilization of backplane bandwidth independent of packet content. The VOQ design eliminates head of line blocking that can occur in output buffered switches. The VOQ design supports as many as 8,000 QoS flows per 10GE port providing massive scalability for QoS services. Each output port supports eight priority queues providing the granularity and flexibility to support a range of service classes. The scheduling of packets from the VOQ queues to the switch fabric is controlled by the output ports ensuring that packets are not transmitted to fully congested ports. This control messaging from output to input enables the system to maintain QoS across the switch fabric. The BigIron RX queuing design and traffic policing comply with the specifications for Assured Forwarding Per Hop Behavior Group for Differentiated IP Services as defined in IETF RFC 2597. This design ensures that high priority packets such as voice over IP packets are forwarded with minimal delay while lower priority queues are not starved resulting in unnecessary packet loss. For traffic policing, the BigIron RX implements dual- rate, three color policing for marking packet drop precedence. Additionally, the BigIron RX supports Weighted Random Early Detection (WRED) to gracefully govern TCP flows in the event of switch congestion. IronShield Security IronShield security features provide access control, denial of service protection and traffic monitoring for the BigIron RX-series. The switches support wire-speed extended Access Control Lists, Secure Shell, Secure Copy, SNMP v3, as well as authentication with AAA, 802.1x, RADIUS, and TACACS+. For network monitoring, the BigIron RX switches support the industry-standard sFlow packet sampling described in RFC 3176. sFlow provides hardware-based and real-time network traffic monitoring, "always-on" fault and performance management, capacity planning, security policing, and network traffic accounting across all switch ports. Availability and Pricing The BigIron RX-series will be available in July, 2005. Pricing will be announced in July, 2005.