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Foundry Introduces Industry's Most Powerful Internet and Metro Router Family Scaling to 3 Billion Packets Per Second in Standard Seven-Foot Rack

NetIron XMR-series Internet and Metro Router Family Establishes New Class of 100 Gigabit Ethernet-ready Service Provider Routers with Unmatched Performance at 1/20th the Price of Alternative Solutions

CHICAGO, June 7 - Foundry Networks®, Inc. (Nasdaq: FDRY - News), a performance and total solutions leader for end-to-end switching and routing, today introduced the NetIron® XMR(TM)-series family of Internet and Metro MPLS Routers at the SuperComm tradeshow which opened this week in Chicago, Illinois. The NetIron XMR-series establishes a new class of IPv4/IPv6/MPLS routers designed for the emerging broadband infrastructure that will be the enabling foundation for the triple play services, converged backbone and broadband VPN offerings that will define the next generation Internet. The NetIron XMR-series features a fully redundant non-blocking 1.92 terabits per second (Tbps) switching fabric delivering 96 gigabits per second (Gbps) full-duplex data capacity per system line slot. This ultra-high capacity positions the NetIron XMR-series as the first router family in the industry to ship ready to support 100 Gigabit Ethernet, a possible next development in Ethernet's continuing evolution. The NetIron XMR-series, which can be seen at booth #41050, delivers carrier-class reliability and unprecedented scalability with forwarding performance to over one billion packets per second (Bpps) in a single chassis and 3 billion packets per second in a standard seven-foot equipment rack -- enough capacity to transfer the entire contents of the U.S. Library of Congress in less than four minutes.

The NetIron XMR-series is a family of carrier-class provider edge and core IPv4/IPv6/MPLS routers that dramatically reduces the cost of implementing converged broadband networks while preserving carrier investment in SONET/SDH optical transport infrastructure. These versatile routers are designed to support a wide range of applications including: provider core label switch routing where 10-Gigabit Ethernet offers a cost-effective alternative to OC-192c/STM-64 Packet over SONET/SDH (POS), provider edge label switch routing for MPLS VPN service creation and aggregation, dual stack IPv4/IPv6 routing for routed IP services and switched Ethernet for layer 2 Metro and regional networks. Featuring a low-latency, non-blocking redundant switch architecture, wire-speed programmable network processors and granular traffic management controls, the NetIron XMR-series routers deliver the performance, system resilience, service richness and quality of service that will benefit a wide range of network providers including Metro and regional service providers, Internet service providers, cable network operators, mobile phone providers, large enterprises, universities and government organizations.

"With the introduction of Foundry's terabit-class NetIron IMR 640 Internet and metro router earlier this year, we began laying the groundwork for a new generation of routers that delivers a truly disruptive solution for implementing the next generation Internet," said Bobby Johnson, Foundry's Chairman and CEO. "Service providers have been at the mercy of their incumbent router vendors, paying exorbitant prices for systems that are costly to maintain, require multiple racks to install and are not designed with the future-readiness needed for maximum return on investment. The NetIron XMR-series addresses the shortcomings of these solutions, providing a disruptive edge-to-core solution that delivers the resilience, scalability, performance and future-proofing desired by service providers, and at price points that will reshape the economics of the broadband industry."

The NetIron XMR-series includes three modular chassis, each supporting redundant management, redundant switch fabric, redundant power supply and redundant cooling components. The NetIron XMR 4000 is a compact four rack unit (RU) high modular router. It supports four half-slot line modules and has an available data forwarding capacity of 384 gigabits per second (Gbps). The NetIron XMR 8000 is seven rack units in height, supports eight half-slot line modules and has an available data forwarding capacity of 768 gigabits per second. The NetIron XMR 16000 is fourteen rack units in height, supports sixteen half-slot line modules and has an available data forwarding capacity of 1.536 terabits per second. With its low profile design, the NetIron XMR 16000 router can be stacked three high in a single seven-foot rack supporting as many as 192 wire-speed 10-GE ports. This density is three times that of Cisco's high-end CRS-1 router platform in a single rack configuration.

The NetIron XMR-series offers a complete edge-to-core solution for the delivery of advanced IP, Ethernet and MPLS VPN services with the scalability, reliability, performance and service level commitments required to fully empower the next generation Internet.

Disruptive Solution for the Next Generation Internet

Service providers have generally relied on high-priced equipment from their incumbent router vendors to build their IP and MPLS networks. List prices for these platforms can start at $450,000 and exceed $5,000,000 for fully configured systems. This is in sharp contrast to the 16-slot NetIron XMR 16000, which starts at a list price of under $50,000 (US list) for a fully redundant chassis -- i.e., redundant 1.92 Tbps switch fabric, management module, power supplies and cooling fans. The NetIron XMR port savings over the incumbent solutions are also dramatic. For example, 10-GE ports on incumbent routers can cost as much as $180,000 per port. The price per 10-GE port for the NetIron XMR is under $6,500 (US list) -- 95% less than competing solutions.

For connecting to OC-192c/STM-64 ports on DWDM transport systems, the NetIron XMR offers another design and price advantage. The 10-GE ports on the NetIron XMR include an integrated LAN-WAN PHY that is software configurable for either LAN or WAN operation. When configured for WAN operation, a NetIron XMR 10-GE port operates in an OC-192c/STM-64-compatible mode useful for connecting to a SONET/SDH port on an optical transport system. To further reduce the cost of the SONET/SDH solution the NetIron XMR 4-port 10-GE module employs low-cost 10-GE XFP optics. While the price for an OC-192c/STM-64 packet over SONET/SDH (POS) port on a core router from other vendors can exceed $250,000, the NetIron XMR-series 10-Gbps WAN interface is priced at less than $8,000 (US list) -- 95% less than the POS solution. Clearly, the NetIron XMR 10-GE WAN interface provides an attractive alternative for supporting fiber distances to thousands of kilometers over DWDM transport networks. This is another example of the significant savings over competing solutions and dramatic evidence of the disruptive potential of the NetIron XMR solution.

Redundant and Resilient Design

To ensure business continuity in the event of equipment failures, the NetIron XMR-series routers are designed with no single point of system failure. The NetIron XMR-series architecture supports redundant common equipment for all three chassis models. The NetIron XMR 4000 and NetIron XMR 8000 support 2+1 fabric redundancy and the NetIron XMR 16000 supports 3+1 fabric redundancy. The NetIron XMR-series routers support graceful fabric degradation, continuing to operate even in the event of two or more fabric module failures. All three models support 1:1 redundancy for the management module and N+1 redundancy for the power module. The NetIron XMR-series also supports in-service software upgrades allowing the network operator to perform software updates without disrupting the operation of the network.

In addition to its redundant common equipment design, the NetIron XMR routers support a number of other design features for maintaining continuous operation. All field serviceable components, including the management modules, interface modules, router fabric modules, power supplies, and fans are hot-swappable. In addition, each interface module has a temperature sensor. The sensor is used to control the system's fan speed and airflow. If the maximum temperature threshold is exceeded for a module, it will be disabled by the system to avoid disrupting router operation. To protect against memory corruption, the NetIron XMR management modules use ECC SDRAM to auto-detect and correct memory errors. These features, together with the self-healing attributes of the underlying Ethernet, IP and MPLS protocols help to ensure maximum uptime for NetIron XMR networks.

Services, Scalability and Quality of Service for the Next Generation Internet

The NetIron XMR-series routers ship with Foundry's IronWare Service Provider operating software supporting a full suite of advanced broadband services including dual stack IPv4/IPv6 routing, Layer 3 VPN (per RFC 2547bis), Layer 2 VPN - Virtual Leased Line (VLL) and Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS), MPLS Traffic Engineering and switched Ethernet services.

The NetIron XMR-series supports extensive scaling in key areas including the BGP routing information base (RIB), the number of hardware-switched MPLS LSPs and IP routes, MAC addresses, access control lists (ACL), traffic policers and more. The system can support 500 BGP peers and 10 million BGP routes in its routing information base (RIB). All packet forwarding is performed in hardware and is controlled by the pre-populated forwarding engines contained on each half-slot line module. This design ensures low latency and wire-speed performance for all-size packets including jumbo frames. As many as one million IP routes and MPLS labels are supported in the hardware system-wide. The system supports as many as 2,000 Virtual Routing and Forwarding (VRF) instances for scalable L3 VPN service delivery and 16,000 VLL/VPLS instances for scalable L2 VPN service creation. The NetIron XMR- series supports 112,000 input and 64,000 output ACL clauses per 20 Gbps network processor for extensive security and policy control.

To support service level agreements for its thousands of VPN services, the NetIron XMR-series implements a rich selection of constrained shortest path routing criteria for its traffic engineered (TE) MPLS tunnels. These criteria include: bandwidth parameters, include/exclude administrative group, hop count, path cost, least/most filled path, as well as explicit routing with loose or strict nodes and hot standby secondary tunnels. Additionally, the NetIron XMR-series supports 4,096 inbound and 4,096 outbound dual-rate, three-color traffic policers per 20 Gbps traffic manager providing fine-grained bandwidth control for hundreds of thousands of traffic flows.

The system's queuing design and traffic policing comply with the specifications for Assured Forwarding Per Hop Behavior Group for Differentiated IP Services as defined in IETF RFC 2597. The NetIron XMR supports configurable combinations of strict priority and weighted fair queuing for flexible queue and QoS management. This design ensures that high priority packets such as voice over IP packets are forwarded with minimal delay while lower priority queues are not starved of bandwidth avoiding unnecessary packet loss. For traffic policing, the NetIron XMR-series implements dual-rate, three-color policing for marking packet drop precedence. Additionally, the NetIron XMR-series supports Weighted Random Early Detection (WRED) to gracefully manage TCP flows in the event of output congestion.

Unmatched Bandwidth Density and Port Capacity

The NetIron XMR-series router family is the densest routing solution in the industry, capable of delivering 110 Gbps throughput per rack unit. This is 70% higher than its closest competitor. The switch fabric in all three models delivers 96 Gbps full-duplex, non-blocking capacity per full-width module slot and 48 Gbps per half-slot. Each full-height line slot accommodates two half-height line modules. In the future, a full-height line module may be configured into the 96 Gbps slot simply by removing the half-slot partition. The NetIron XMR-series is the only router family that ships both 40-GE ready and 100-GE ready, providing network operators with significant future investment protection. The half-slot design provides graceful and cost-effective growth, lower sparing costs and enhanced serviceability.

Clos Switch Fabric with VOQ Design Delivers Non-blocking Performance, Fault Tolerance, Low Latency and Quality of Service

At the heart of the NetIron XMR-series architecture is a single-stage, adaptive self-routing Clos fabric with virtual output queuing (VOQ). The Clos design allows for a consistent and scalable architecture for all three router models based on a common switching element. The fabric supports adaptive routing around system failures and fair utilization of backplane bandwidth independent of packet content.

The VOQ design eliminates head of line blocking that can occur in output buffered systems. The VOQ design supports as many as 8,000 queues per 20 Gbps traffic manager providing massive scalability for QoS-based services. Each output port supports eight priority queues providing the granularity and flexibility to support a range of service classes. Input to output packet scheduling is managed by a distributed real-time scheduling mechanism that maximizes switch efficiency and minimizes packet loss in the event of output queue congestion. The fabric's distributed packet scheduling provides for a more scalable solution than architectures that use centralized schedulers.

IronShield Security
IronShield security features provide access control, denial of service protection and traffic monitoring for the NetIron XMR-series. The routers support wire-speed extended Access Control Lists, Secure Shell, Secure Copy, SNMP v3, as well as authentication with AAA, 802.1x, RADIUS, and TACACS+. For network monitoring, the NetIron XMR-series routers support the industry-standard sFlow(TM) packet sampling described in RFC 3176. sFlow provides hardware-based and real-time network traffic monitoring, "always-on" fault and performance management, capacity planning, security policing, and network traffic accounting across all router ports.

Availability and Pricing
The NetIron XMR-series will be available in September, 2005. Pricing will be announced in August, 2005.

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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