INTERCONNECTS

Foundry Networks, Inc. a performance and total solutions leader for end-to-end switching and routing, today added a compact 8-port 10-Gigabit Ethernet switch to its EdgeIron family of Layer 2 Ethernet switches. With a non-blocking 160-Gbps Ethernet switch design and wire-speed 10-GbE forwarding performance on every port, the EdgeIron 8X10G switch is the ideal solution for small enterprise backbone, as well as high performance cluster and grid computing interconnect networks. Consistent with the existing EdgeIron family of Layer 2 switches, the EdgeIron 8X10G switch features an advanced suite of standards-based Layer 2 switching features and services, redundant power supplies, and industry standard CLI. Foundry will display the new switch at the 2004 NetWorld + Interop tradeshow, which opens this week in Las Vegas, Nevada. The EdgeIron 8X10G switch supports wire-speed switching on eight 10-GbE ports in a compact one rack-unit (1U) form factor. The switch uses state-of-the-art 10-Gigabit Small Form Factor Pluggable (XFP) optical transceivers, providing a lower cost and more power-efficient solution than alternative transceivers. Delivering performance of nearly 120 million packets per second (MPPS), the EdgeIron 8X10G switch is expected to be the highest performance, non-blocking 10-GbE switch in its class. The new switch supports important security features including secure Web access, secure TELNET sessions and SNMPv3 to secure and encrypt management transactions. In addition, the EdgeIron 8X10G switch features extensive Layer 2/3 access control and MAC address filtering to secure application traffic. For data center applications, support for jumbo frames helps to maximize performance for cluster computing, web and application services and storage networking The EdgeIron 8X10G switch also supports quality of service queuing, extensive packet statistics, IEEE 802.3ad link aggregation and IEEE 802.1w rapid spanning tree for sub-second service protection. "Foundry Networks has been the 10-GbE market leader since 2001 with our broad range of Layer 2/3 10-GbE products from network edge to core," said Ken Cheng, vice president of marketing at Foundry. "With the introduction of the EdgeIron 8x10G, customers now have a cost-effective and easy to deploy Layer 2 solution for 10-Gigabit Ethernet aggregation and server farm connectivity. This announcement further demonstrates our commitment to providing our customers with the most extensive and cost-effective 10-Gigabit Ethernet solutions in the industry." Availability The EdgeIron 8X10G switch will be available in summer 2004.