SANTA CLARA, Calif., Jan. 30, 2007 (PRIME NEWSWIRE) -- Foundry Networks(r), Inc. (Nasdaq:FDRY), a performance and total solutions leader for end-to-end switching and routing, today announced that the London Internet Exchange (LINX), one of the largest global Internet Exchange Points (IXP), has installed the award-winning BigIron RX-16 Series backbone switches to meet rapid growth in its membership, which is comprised of the world's leading content and Internet service providers. The increased switch capacity is required as the volume of carried Internet traffic is growing 50 percent year-over-year; today LINX handles more than 116 Gigabits of traffic per second.
LINX is a not-for-profit organisation owned by its content delivery and Internet Service Provider members, offering peering between all the parties to exchange Internet traffic in order to reduce costs and provide more direct routing of traffic. Membership has exploded in the past four years, up from 120 to over 230 organisations today, with 18 percent growth in 2006 alone. This makes it one of the largest IXPs, and among the best for international reach with LINX members coming from over 30 different countries around the world, with access provided to over 50 percent of the global routing table.
A long-standing customer, LINX has consistently powered its networks with various Foundry switches over the years and was one of the first organisations to purchase its 10-Gigabit Ethernet (10-GbE) switches in 2002.
"With demand for GbE and 10-GbE port connectivity outstripping the capabilities of our existing infrastructure, we knew we'd have to buy new chassis to cope," said Mike Hughes, chief technology officer for LINX. "Switch technology has jumped a great deal recently and next generation products like the BigIron RX are better, faster and more cost-effective than what was considered leading edge just 12 months ago."
Such high-speed connectivity is required by the LINX as it needs to keep pace with demands placed on it by members and maintain 'headroom' capacity to deal with sudden upturns in Internet usage or massive failures in the Internet elsewhere in the world.
The BigIron RX series switches also enabled LINX to cope with the shift in the type of traffic commonly handled today, namely real-time applications like voice and video, which are sensitive to congestion on the network. Hughes comments, "Our testing showed that, compared to the competition, the BigIron RX switches have very low jitter, in other words, the delay in the frames going through the box is uniform which means sound and video are smooth as packets aren't re-ordered or dropped."
The new switches also feature Foundry's Metro Ring Protocol II (MRP2), which enables the creation of multiple overlapping network rings without a single point of failure. Using the new BigIron RX16 and MRP2, LINX has created a virtual 40-GbE core by trunking together four 10-GbE links, with smaller 10-GbE rings connecting to it using existing Foundry switches. Should there be break in Internet transmission, MRP2 works in milli-seconds to find an alternative path to route traffic, thereby, offering a huge boost to ensuring service reliability.
Hughes explains, "If there was an outage at LINX, which went on long enough, it would mean that network operator routers would start reconfiguring their forwarding tables and there would be a 'ripple in the pond' effect, which would in turn slow Internet traffic down. MRP2 means that you don't drop the stone in the pond in the first place, and network efficiency is maintained which is especially important for the proper functioning of real time applications like voice and video conferencing."
Built for high availability, the BigIron RX-16s feature complete hardware resiliency with redundant management, switch fabrics, power and cooling. This is complemented by advanced software resiliency including hitless failover and hitless software upgrades.
Hughes concludes, "One of the key aspects about Foundry is the ease at which equipment can be upgraded and next generation solutions interoperating with existing product. We're often re-building the aircraft in flight -- enhancing the network and moving customers with us at the same time. This is crucial since higher density switches will always be needed as capacity demands keep escalating. We'll need even higher density 10-GbE switches to keep up with this. In three years time, I'll be looking for a box the same size as the current BigIron RX but with the same number of 100 GbE ports as there are 10-GbE today -- it is great to see the company thinking this way already by making BigIron RX-16 chassis completely 100 Gigabit ready."
"LINX is a flagship reference site for us and demonstrates how our high-performance networking design and engineering approach applies in practice," said Ken Cheng, vice president and general manager, high-end and service provider systems business unit for Foundry Networks. "In the past, some vendors have made claims to powering the Internet, but it would be fair to say, given the amount of traffic that LINX handles with Foundry switches, that we're powering the Internet but at today's speeds, namely 10-GbE."
About Foundry Networks
Foundry Networks, Inc. (Nasdaq:FDRY) is a leading provider of high-performance enterprise and service provider switching, routing, security and Web traffic management solutions, including Layer 2/3 LAN switches, Layer 3 Backbone switches, Layer 4-7 application switches, wireless LAN and access points, access routers and metro routers. Foundry's 10,400 customers include the world's premier ISPs, metro service providers, and enterprises, including e-commerce sites, universities, entertainment, health and wellness, government, financial and manufacturing companies. For more information about the company and its products, call 1.888.TURBOLAN or visit www.foundrynetworks.com.
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