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Foundry Adds Multi-Site Scalability And Resilience To Industry's Leading Price-Performance Application Switch Family

ServerIronGT E-series Global Server Load Balancing Ensures Business Continuity and Geographic Scalability for Mission-Critical Application Services

San Jose, CA, November 3, 2004 - Foundry Networks®, Inc. (Nasdaq: FDRY) a performance and total solutions leader for end-to-end switching and routing, today announced the availability of TrafficWorksTM Global Server Load Balancing software (GSLB) for its award-winning application switch family, the ServerIron® GT E-series. GSLB enables enterprise and service provider organizations to build scalable and resilient application infrastructure by intelligently load balancing and redirecting traffic amongst multiple data center sites. TrafficWorks GSLB uses server and site health information, server utilization, server proximity and application response time to load balance traffic across multiple sites and to redirect traffic to healthy resources in the event of server or network faults.

The ServerIronGT E-series line of application switches won the "Best Enterprise Infrastructure Product" award at N+I Tokyo in 2004 for its combination of Layer 2-7 feature integration, attractive pricing, high-availability design, port expandability and performance upgradeability.

The product family is powered by Foundry's TrafficWorks traffic management operating system. TrafficWorks supports a rich set of Layer 4 and Layer 7 content-based load balancing services, high-availability configurations with stateful failover, a suite of network defense measures including detection and mitigation of denial of service attacks and policy-based load balancing for SPAM mitigation. Optional TrafficWorks features include GSLB and IP routing.

TrafficWorks GSLB uses standards-based DNS and IP routing protocols to direct users to sites that provide the best application response time. This design approach allows seamless deployment and transparent operation in existing networking environments. TrafficWorks GSLB applies sophisticated site selection and failover algorithms to optimize application performance and to maintain application availability in the event of a site or an application server failure. Real-time information about application response time, site and server health, and site proximity is also used to optimize traffic distribution.

ServerIron application switches combine the benefits of GSLB with DNS load balancing, DNS security and traffic offload to secure and scale the DNS infrastructure. TrafficWorks GSLB improves DNS server utilization and availability by caching and proxying DNS responses. GSLB also provides a line of defense for DNS servers by rate-limiting DNS queries from individual clients. TrafficWorks GSLB is unique in the industry in its capacity to scale to hundreds of domains and sites, and thousands of hosts and servers, meeting the needs of the largest enterprise and service provider networks in the world.

"Redundant and scalable application infrastructure has been a longstanding requirement for E-commerce organizations, public network operators and application service providers," said Bob Schiff, vice president and general manager of the Layer 4-7 and Security Products Business Unit for Foundry. "Many enterprise customers are now requiring similar levels of performance and reliability because of the critical nature of their application infrastructure. By introducing TrafficWorks GSLB technology to the ServerIronGT E-series family, Foundry is providing a flexible and cost-effective solution for enterprise organizations to scale and optimize application performance while ensuring application availability across multiple sites."

Foundry's ServerIron application switches provide sophisticated Internet traffic and content management features including server load balancing, URL and cookie based switching, global server load balancing, and transparent cache switching. Some of the world's most demanding customers such as AOL TimeWarner, NTT DoCoMo, and Wachovia Bank rely on Foundry ServerIron systems for server farm scalability and application security.

Pricing and Availability

The GSLB Software option for ServerIronGT EGx2, E16GC, EGx4 and E10Gx2 - $3,995 US List

GT E-series switch models:

  • ServerIronGT EGx2: 2-port Gigabit Ethernet - $15,995 US List
  • ServerIronGT EGC16: 16-port Gigabit Ethernet over Copper - $19,995 US List
  • ServerIronGT EGx4: 4-port Gigabit Ethernet - $24,995 US List
  • ServerIronGT E10Gx2: 2-port 10-Gigabit Ethernet - $44,995 US List

ServerIronGT E-series application switches and the GSLB premium software option 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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