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Foundry Adds Family Of Web Accelerators To Application Switch Line To Create The Industry's Most Scalable Solution For Web And Ip Services Delivery

Performance-Leading ServerIronSA Web Accelerators and ServerIron Layer 4-7 Switches Provide Best-in-Class Application Delivery Solution with Scalable SSL Acceleration and Content Compression for Optimized Application Performance

San Jose, CA, Dec. 13, 2004 – Foundry Networks®, Inc. (Nasdaq: FDRY), a performance and total solutions leader for end-to-end switching and routing, today announced a family of web accelerators designed to optimize the delivery of web-enabled applications and to scale web server farms and applications. Unlike many solutions on the market, the new ServerIron®SA accelerators combine best-of-breed SSL acceleration with high-performance web content compression to maximize application performance and bandwidth utilization. The combination of a ServerIronSA accelerator and ServerIron application switch provides a highly scalable traffic management solution for server farms supporting a mix of web and non-web IP applications to deliver optimized performance, robust security, high availability and business continuity. ServerIronSA accelerators implement standards-based HTTP compression techniques to reduce bandwidth utilization by as much as 75%, significantly improving application performance and throughput.

Many enterprise and service provider organizations rely on their web application servers to process SSL-encrypted web traffic. As SSL traffic demand increases, server-based SSL termination can become a performance bottleneck. The ServerIronSA web accelerators solve this problem with centralized SSL processing and HTTP compression, offloading the servers of computationally-intensive SSL processing and inefficient certificate management. By deploying a ServerIronSA accelerator with a ServerIron application switch, customers benefit from improved application performance, centralized certificate management, extensive SSL scalability and high availability for web and non-web applications. Additionally, ServerIron global load balancing can be used to provide optimized traffic distribution and disaster recovery across multiple data center sites.

Key features of Foundry's application switching solution include:

  • SSL Termination and Acceleration: The ServerIronSA accelerator offloads the servers from computationally-intensive SSL processing, and delivers HTTP content to the servers. Additional content inspection and content filtering on SSL traffic can be enforced prior to delivering traffic to servers directly, which increases overall server farm security.
  • Centralized Certificate Management: The solution provides more efficient utilization of SSL certificates and prevents the proliferation of certificates across many servers. Simplified and centralized management improves overall site security.
  • HTTP Compression for Bandwidth Optimization: The ServerIronSA accelerator uses standards-based compression to transparently compress application content. The system automatically detects a client browser's compression capabilities and the type of content in individual server responses, and applies the appropriate compression technique.
  • High Availability SSL: The ServerIron application switch monitors the health of the connected ServerIronSA web accelerators and automatically redistributes traffic to working web accelerators in the event of a failure.
  • Massive Scalability: The solution offers virtually unlimited scalability for SSL and HTTP compression by supporting multiple accelerators in a clustered configuration.
  • End-to-End SSL Support: For high security environments, the web accelerators can terminate SSL, send the content to the ServerIron application switch for content-based switching and re-encrypt to the back-end servers for end-to-end security and confidentiality.

"The ServerIronSA family of web accelerators complements our performance-leading line of Layer 4-7 application switches, providing our customers with a powerful and complete solution for securing, scaling and optimizing the data center," said Bob Schiff, vice president and general manager of the Layer 4-7 and Security Products Business Unit for Foundry. "Our customers are seeing significant growth in SSL traffic. The ServerIronSA products provide a scalable and high-performance solution for managing these applications. Additionally, integrated support for transparent HTTP compression improves application performance and can reduce bandwidth costs in the wide area."

ServerIronSA web application accelerators are available in the following configurations:

  • ServerIronSA 100: Supports up to 200 new SSL connections per second with 100 Mbps compression throughput and 10,000 concurrent SSL connections.
  • ServerIronSA 400: Supports up to 5,000 new SSL connections per second with 350 Mbps application throughput and 64,000 concurrent SSL connections. The system comes configured with redundant AC power supplies.
  • ServerIronSA 800: Supports up to 11,000 new SSL connections per second with 700 Mbps application throughput and 100,000 concurrent SSL connections. The system comes configured with redundant AC power supplies.

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. ServerIron and ServerIronGT E-series application switches offer modular expandability and performance upgradeability for maximum investment protection. 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.

The ServerIronSA family of web application accelerators will be available in February 2005 with the following list prices:

  • ServerIronSA 100: $9,995 U.S. List
  • ServerIronSA 400: $22,995 U.S. List
  • ServerIronSA 800: $34,995 U.S. List

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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