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Foundry Doubles The Performance Of The Industry's Most Successful Application Switch And Announces New Configurations With Best-In-Class Pricing

Performance Enhancements, Advanced Features and New Pricing Extend ServerIronXL Price-Performance Leadership in Application Switch Market

San Jose, CA, Aug. 31, 2004 - Foundry Networks®, Inc. (Nasdaq: FDRY) a performance and total solutions leader for end-to-end switching and routing, today announced significant enhancements to its ServerIron®XL family of load balancing application switches, including new configuration options, an enhanced operating system that doubles application switching performance, and reduced pricing, further increasing the product's value proposition to operators of small to mid-sized data centers and application server farms.

ServerIronXL is Foundry's family of general-purpose, aggressively priced load balancing application switches -- more than 15,000 ServerIronXL switches are installed around the world, making it one of the most popular solutions on the market for network load balancing within enterprises and server farms. The ServerIronXL switch is the most feature-rich solution in its class, and supports a full suite of traffic management applications – Server Load Balancing, Global Server Load Balancing, Firewall Load Balancing, Link Load Balancing, Transparent Cache Switching and Layer 7 content switching.

New configuration options for the ServerIronXL include a 16-port 10/100 model with two ports of Gigabit Ethernet-over-Copper (GoC) and a 16-port 10/100 model with two ports of Gigabit Ethernet-over-Fiber. These new configurations will be an attractive solution for networks with 10/100 Ethernet connections at the edge, and Gigabit Ethernet connections to the network backbone.

The two new configurations complement other ServerIronXL products which include higher-density 24-port 10/100 Ethernet systems with options for one or two ports of Gigabit Ethernet uplinks.

"The ServerIronXL is providing secure and reliable application traffic management in hundreds of enterprise and service provider networks, including some of the world's largest ISPs," said Bob Schiff, vice president of Foundry's Layer 4-7 business unit. "By doubling its performance and enhancing its multi-purpose design, Foundry is making the ServerIronXL an even more compelling solution for IT managers responsible for building scalable and resilient data center infrastructure."

The ServerIronXL switches are now shipping with an advanced operating system that uses sophisticated new algorithms and optimized software to effectively double the systems' load-balancing performance.

The ServerIronXL switches are part of Foundry's comprehensive line of Layer 4-7 load balancing, traffic management and security offerings which include the ServerIronGT-E mid-range systems, the ServerIronGT family of gateway switches, as well as the ServerIron 450/850 family of high-end systems that feature optional 10-Gigabit Ethernet uplinks. ServerIron switches enable network managers to build and secure business-critical application infrastructure that is massively scalable and always available. Many of the world's most demanding enterprise, service provider, e-commerce and government organizations rely on ServerIron switches to enable highly secure and always-on applications.

"We use ServerIronXL for load balancing many of the customer-facing services like web applications and VoIP at our 16 data centers throughout the U.S. to ensure reliability, scalability and service security in order to provide the excellent network performance demanded by Cox customers," said Michael Hamelin, network and security architect for Cox Communications.

Key features of ServerIronXL switches include:

  • Efficient Load Balancing: Support for a range of load balancing methods and metrics including least connections, server weight, application response time, and link capacity to maximize server farm efficiency and availability.
  • Intelligent Content Switching: Advanced content inspection engine provides application-aware switching for standard and proprietary protocols.
  • Link Load Balancing: The Link Balancer distributes network traffic load across multiple ISP links using an array of powerful methods and eliminates the need for complex routing implementations. The Link Balancer product can distribute traffic over six T-3 or two OC-3 links.
  • High Availability: Support for a number of high-availability configurations, including active-active and active-standby, protect the network from downtime and maximize server and application availability. Support for real-time synchronization and stateful failover of client connections between switches help eliminate disruption to application transactions during switch failures.
  • Disaster Recovery and Data Center Redundancy: Global Server Load Balancing provides application scalability across multiple data centers and server farms, and disaster recovery during catastrophic failures.
  • Sophisticated Health Checks: User-configurable and customizable health checks are used to check server performance and health . This capability is used to quickly identify downed server resources so that client connections can be redirected to available servers.
  • Transparent Application Support: Load balancing and Layer 7 content switching support for any IP application using TCP and UDP for transport. Transparent support for many standard protocols including HTTP, FTP, TELNET, and SMTP, and proprietary applications.

Pricing and Availability

ServerIronXL switches are priced beginning at $8,995 for a 16-port 10/100 system. The 16-port ServerIronXL systems with two Gigabit Fiber or Copper uplinks are priced at $10,995. A 24-port 10/100 system is priced at $14,995. Redundant power supply and various uplink options are available on both the 16-and 24-port ServerIronXL switches. All ServerIronXL systems are available immediately.

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, metro routers and core routers. Foundry's 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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