SANTA CLARA, Calif. and LAS VEGAS, May 22, 2007 (PRIME NEWSWIRE) -- Foundry Networks(r), Inc. (Nasdaq:FDRY), a performance and total solutions leader for end-to-end switching and routing, today announced the world's most powerful and energy efficient routing switch optimized to address growing capacity and performance needs within the data center, high-performance computing (HPC), and Internet Exchange Points (IXP). With 1,536 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) ports or 128 10-Gigabit Ethernet (10-GbE) ports and approximately 2.2 Billion packets per second (Bpps) of throughput, the BigIron(r) RX-32 has the industry's greatest performance per rack unit, making it the most powerful Ethernet switch with the lowest Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) available today.
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Research firm, Dell 'Oro Group, reported more than 200 percent year-over-year growth in 10GbE port shipments each year for the past three years. They are forecasting this growth rate to accelerate resulting in over 5.2 Million 10GbE ports sold in 2009. Since capacity needs are rapidly increasing due to more complex networking topologies, including virtualized data centers, data mining and converged HPC centers, large organizations require a switching solution that will meet the requirements of today and will scale to manage the predicted capacity and performance demands of tomorrow. In addition to performance needs, organizations recognize that lack of power efficiency can decrease their Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) significantly and it can be a critical factor in their ability to expand or upgrade their networking facilities while freeing up resources for growing computing power needs.
Total Cost of Ownership Value Proposition
To minimize ongoing Operational Expenditures (OpEx) in data centers, HPCs, and lXPs, the BigIron RX-32 excels in several key areas: line card compatibility, system cooling needs and power consumption. Because switches remain on continuously and traditionally require massive volumes of energy for cooling and processing, ongoing power draw requirements for large chassis play a critical role in an organizations bottom line. The other factor to consider is the facilities' power source accessibility. Since more performance and capacity often has a direct correlation to electrical power draw, existing networking centers now face a new challenge: wattage availability. Adding more power to a location can often be the limiting factor for organizations' ability to grow since local power companies are only able to supply a pre-designed limit causing significant time delays and additional costs to network upgrade time to completion. This can wreak havoc to growing enterprises by delaying development and expansion thus stifling revenue.
Purpose built to alleviate OpEx by significantly reducing valuable rack space and power consumption when compared to multi-chassis designs, the BigIron RX-32 uses a fraction of the power of competing platforms making it an ideal high-performance networking solution for space and energy constrained environments. A single BigIron RX-32 with 1,536 wire-speed 10/100/100 ports will consume only 11.1KW of power, whereas competitive solutions typically require 12 chassis in a multi-stage configuration consuming approximately 46KW of power, more than four times more power with a similar four-fold increase in cooling costs. Power efficiency is achieved using an advanced and highly efficient design, allowing the BigIron RX-32 to produce industry-leading performance results with less power hungry chip-sets and ASICS, within a single chassis, eliminating the costly overhead associated with multiple chassis solutions.
To further decrease TCO, the BigIron RX-32 utilizes the same software image and same standard interface modules used across the entire BigIron RX Series. Interface module portability and reusability significantly reduces sparing costs and company training costs, thereby providing superior economies of scale. Additionally, utilizing the same software image across the series lowers training and operational expenses as well.
"Enterprise data center and high-performance computing traffic is growing significantly worldwide due to more data intensive applications," said Tere' Bracco, senior research director for enterprise markets for Current Analysis. "With the introduction of an ultra-high capacity switch like the BigIron RX-32, Foundry reinforces its position in the enterprise switching market with the a solution that promises to enable enterprises to increase their data accessibility considerably while reducing their overall networking costs."
"The BigIron RX-32 marks a significant milestone for the networking industry," said Bobby Johnson, president and CEO for Foundry Networks. "This is one of the highest-performing and most dense full featured switches on the market today; it marks a new paradigm for networking design providing significantly improved cost models to grant additional value to customers."
Industry Leading Performance and Advanced Capabilities
The addition of the BigIron RX-32 into the networking market represents a major breakthrough in switching performance and capacity by providing the greatest number of GbE ports available in a single chassis. With approximately 2.2 Bpps of IP switching and IPv4, IPv6 routing, the BigIron RX-32 is powered by a resilient non-blocking 5.12 Terabits per second (Tbps) switch fabric based on state-of-the-art multi-stage Clos fabric architecture.
Capitalizing on state-of-the-art resiliency for maximizing service availability and up time, the BigIron RX-32 routing switch features redundant management, redundant switch fabric, power supplies, and cooling components. An advanced fabric design ensures continued operation even under low probability high-impact events, including multiple partial/full fabric failures where the system continues to operate in Degraded Capacity Mode, tuning its performance gracefully to the remaining fabric capacity. To complement these features, the BigIron RX-32 offers hitless Layer2/3 management failover, hitless Layer 2 software upgrades and resilient protocols including Metro Ring Protocol (MRP) / MRP2 to radically enhance end-to-end availability. The resiliency and massive capacity of these switches will enable migration to highly available virtualized data centers, build-out of large-scale data mining compute centers, and converged HPC networks.
Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq:CDNS) is the world's leading electronic design automation (EDA) technologies and engineering services company. Recently, Cadence's large-scale data center backbone has experienced a tremendous influx in IP traffic attributed to bandwidth intensive applications required to create and test the world's most advanced semiconductors and circuit boards used in consumer electronics, networking, telecommunications equipment and computer systems, amplifying their need for more capacity and density. "We recently upgraded our data center network core with several Foundry BigIron RX Series switches and we will continue to actively seek viable solutions to manage the growing capacity surge in network traffic," said Dan Salisbury, vice president of IT for Cadence Design Systems. "As our capacity needs increase, we will definitely consider a routing switch that can deliver ultra-high capacity, cost efficient use of GbE/10GbE, and can scale to support the current and future network traffic growth, as these capabilities are vital to our next-generation data center network."
Pricing and Availability
BigIron RX-32 Base System: $194,995 USD
* Includes management, fabrics, power supplies, cooling, and
cable management
For a more information and a live viewing of the BigIron RX-32, please visit booth No. 1425 at Interop Las Vegas 2007
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, 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.foundrynet.com.
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Safe Harbor Statement
The foregoing may contain "forward-looking statements" which are based on management's current information and beliefs as well as on a number of assumptions concerning future events made by management. These forward-looking statements include, without limitation, statements by executives or spokespeople regarding Foundry's positioning and potential plans. The forward-looking statements in this press release are only predictions and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ materially. Foundry assumes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements contained in this press release.
Disclaimer
No statements made by Foundry Networks, Inc. ("Foundry") in this press release, or information contained herein, may be deemed to constitute either an amendment of an existing agreement or an implied new commitment, promise or legal obligation by Foundry to develop or deliver any specific product, feature or functionality.
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