Force10 Networks, a pioneer in scalable resiliency for high performance switching and routing, today announced its industry-leading hitless failover technology, an advanced feature that eliminates the downtime associated with system errors and reduces productivity and revenue losses. As the first and only 10 Gigabit networking vendor to demonstrate failover of both Layer 2 switching and Layer 3 routing traffic with zero packet loss, Force10 brings to networks an unmatched resiliency and predictability. The cost of productivity and business losses resulting from network downtime continues to spiral upwards as organizations become more reliant on their networks. Industry analyst firm Gartner estimates that the hourly cost of network downtime is $42,000. A typical business experiences, on average, about 87 hours of downtime a year, resulting in total losses of more than $3.6 million. "Hitless failover technology brings to high performance networking environments the resiliency required to reduce the high costs of network downtime," said Andrew Feldman, vice president of marketing for Force10 Networks. "Force10's hitless technology leads the industry in providing near instantaneous failover with zero packet loss." Force10's hitless failover technology increases network predictability by bringing an added layer of resiliency to the E-Series family of switch/routers. The hitless failover technology leverages the built-in route processor redundancy of the E-Series to maximize network availability and guarantee automatic failover to secondary processor modules in the event of a failure. To further ensure network resiliency, the E-Series combines Force10's hitless failover technology with its non-stop forwarding capabilities, which ensure that traffic is forwarded during a processor module failover. With demonstrated full failover of less than 10 microseconds, the Force10 E-Series switches between primary and secondary modules without dropping a single packet. Force10 will host a webinar on February 24, at 11:00 a.m. PST to explore best practices and technologies that network operators can deploy to bring a new level of reliability to their network and applications. Registration information is available at: http://www.force10networks.com/news/wb-2004-02-24.asp. The E-Series combines fully distributed hardware with the modular Force10 operating system (FTOS) software to deliver line-rate Gigabit and 10 Gigabit throughput across all ports regardless of traffic conditions while built-in hardware redundancy guarantees performance continuity. The modular FTOS allocates individual processes to multiple system processors for maximum resiliency and fault tolerance. Force10's hitless upgrade and failover technologies further increase the power of the E-Series to bring unmatched performance predictability to networks.