Skip to content

Foundry Continues Leadership of 10 Gigabit Ethernet Market With Introduction of Industry's Broadest Range of 10-Gbe Products, Highest Port Density and Lowest Price-Per-Port

New Generation of Products Designed to Accelerate Adoption of 10-GbE

San Jose, CA, November 8, 2004 - Foundry Networks®, Inc. (Nasdaq: FDRY) a performance and total solutions leader for end-to-end switching and routing, today announced a broad range of industry-leading 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10-GbE) products, including major scalability and performance enhancements for its award-winning, high-performance BigIron® MG8 10-GbE modular switch, new 10-GbE small form factor aggregation, workgroup and stacking switches and new 10-GbE XENPAK optical transceivers. The new products are designed to accelerate mainstream enterprise and service provider adoption of 10-GbE by adding a diverse range of high-performance, highly integrated and flexible solutions to Foundry's product portfolio at industry-leading prices starting at $2,500 per 10-GbE port.

"Industry analysts have been predicting a sharp ramp in 10-GbE customer adoptions in the late 2005 or 2006 timeframe, coinciding with 10-GbE prices dropping to less than $3,000 per port. With this announcement, Foundry's product evolution and price/performance is ahead of this price curve by more than a year," said Ken Cheng, vice president and general manager of the Layer 2/3 Switching and Routing Solutions Business Unit for Foundry. "We have been the 10-GbE market leader since 2001. Our strategy is to offer the broadest and most diverse portfolio of 10-GbE products for edge, backbone and data centers, providing our customers in both enterprise and service provider environments scalable, flexible, cost-effective 10-GbE solutions."

Industry's Best 10-GbE Scalability and Port Density

Foundry's new 10-GbE products include a new 8-port 10-GbE module for the BigIron MG8 platform, which allows Foundry to deliver the best scalability and highest 10-GbE port density in the industry, with up to 64 ports of 10-GbE in a single switch, or up to 192 10-GbE ports per rack. The BigIron MG8 is an ideal solution for high-availability, low-latency converged applications, and high-density, bandwidth-intensive enterprise and service provider data centers such as Internet exchanges, hosting, and high-performance computing. It supports a wide variety of 10-GbE applications with a rich set of purpose-built features such as support for IPv4/IPv6, hitless L2/L3 failover, multicast, bandwidth control, and traffic monitoring.

Lowest 10-GbE Price-per-Port

The EdgeIron® 8X10G is a new 8-port 10-GbE aggregation switch with an industry-leading price-per-port of $2,500. At just one rack unit high, it is the most compact and cost-effective 10-GbE switch on the market today. Featuring, hot-pluggable XFP 10-GbE optics, out-of-band 10/100 Ethernet management, and performance of up to 120 million packets per second, it is an ideal solution for cluster and high performance computing environments, high performance backbone switching for small to medium enterprises, data center 10-GbE aggregation and high performance server farm connectivity.

High-Performance, Low-Cost Edge and Aggregation 10-GbE Switches for Deployment Flexibility

The FastIron® Workgroup X424 and X448 (FWS X424 and FWS X448) are new wire-speed 10/100/1000 Layer 2 edge switches with optional 10GbE uplinks (1 or 2). They are purpose-built for high system availability and feature 24 or 48 ports of Gigabit over Copper (GoC) connectivity, redundant AC/DC, hot-swappable power supplies, front-panel accessibility, and a compact 1.5 unit high form factor. They are an excellent solution for high density, GoC wiring closets, data center GoC server connectivity and high performance "top-of-the-rack" switching for supercomputing environments. The FastIron Workgroup switch family offers performance of up to 102 million packets per second.

The EdgeIron 24GS and 48GS are new 24- or 48-port Gigabit Ethernet edge switches with optional 10-GbE uplinks, that can be stacked up to eight units high and managed as a single switch, allowing them to support up to 384 ports of GoC per stack and up to 8 ports of 10-GbE. With high-speed, 40 Gigabit per second stack connections, they offer operational simplicity and built-in upgradeability to support growth. The new EdgeIron GS switches are an ideal solution for wiring closets, small-medium backbone switching and data center GoC connectivity, where their economical and optional 10-GbE uplinks allow them to meet customers' performance needs today and handle their need for increased bandwidth well into the future.

New 10-GbE Optics

Foundry also added a 10GBASE-LX4 XENPAK optic for legacy physical plant support (330 m over FDDI-grade MMF, or 10km over SMF), which will allow 10 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity for legacy multi-mode fiber installations, and a 10GBASE-CX4 XENPAK optic which offers a low cost copper solution for high density, local proximity 10 Gigabit environments such as high performance computing, data centers and server farms.

Pricing and Availability

8x10GbE module US List: $50,000 Int'l List: $55,000 Available: Jan.'05
EdgeIron 8x10G US List: $19,995 Int'l List: $21,995 Available: NOW
EdgeIron 24GS US List: $3,995 Int'l List: $4,395 Available: NOW
EdgeIron 48GS US List: $5,995 Int'l List: $6,595 Available: NOW
FWS X424 US List: $3,995 Int'l List: $4,395 Available: Dec.'04
FWS X448 US List: $5,995 Int'l List: $6,595 Available: Dec.'04
10G-XNPK-LX4 US List: $4,995 Int'l List: $5,495 Available: Dec.'04
10G-XNPK-CX4 US List: $995 Int'l List: $1,095 Available: NOW

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.

Media Contacts