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VoIP Solutions

Voice over IP (VoIP) and converged networking solutions deliver a broad range of benefits to enterprises, including enhanced productivity, lower operational costs, and increased management visibility. Foundry Networks unlocks the value in a converged network by offering an expansive set of VoIP-ready networking solutions that deliver uninterrupted service quality, reliability, security, and compatibility for IP-based phones, video, and converged desktop applications.

Overview

Today's networks are providing services thought impossible just a few years ago. Internet, e-mail, voice and video conferencing are just a few of the business applications that are placing higher demands upon the network Infrastructure. The standards and demands for the network infrastructure have never been higher. Delivering voice solutions requires more than just connectivity. Issues such as call quality, reliability, availability, security and power management are paramount in the complete voice solution. Foundry provides a complete set of switching & routing solutions that help customers move into VoIP solutions without replacing their network infrastructure.

Foundry's VoIP ready networking solutions provide a rich set of features that insure the highest quality VoIP environment, for both our stackable and chassis edge products.  These enhanced features includes:

  • Layer 2-3 automatic, dynamic honoring of QoS
  • Integrated, redundant, hot-swappable AC/DC power supplies
  • Legacy and 802.3af Power over Ethernet support
  • Automatic phone discovery and voice VLAN placement
  • IronShield 360 converged security for access control, intrusion detection, and secure enforcement
  • VoIP Wireless Mobility
  • Enhanced 911 (E911) support

Foundry believes that customers should be able to choose the tools that are right for their business and we strive to build solutions that will enable any telephony vendor's solutions to interoperate with Foundry's superior network infrastructure equipment. To this end, we work with many of the best-of-breed IP telephony vendors to deliver certified solutions to our customers.

VoIP overview

Dynamic QoS Honoring and Automated Voice VLAN Discovery

Foundry's VoIP ready networking solutions are built to provide QoS support without the need for manual configuration. This eliminates both the work in defining complex QoS configurations and the possibility that the configuration will be incorrect. Foundry automatically delivers QoS honoring in our edge stackable and chassis switches. We can honor both 802.1p and DSCP markings, and we provide simple commands to remap markings for end-end QoS in a switched and routed network.

Foundry's VoIP networking architecture integrates wire-speed switching performance with advanced queuing to insure that your key VoIP traffic is delivered with the same high-quality that has come to be expected in the analog telephony world. We have validated our QoS features both internally, at multiple customer sites, and with our broad set of VoIP partners.

In addition, Foundry's edge products support a variety of industry standard methods for placing an IP phone on the proper Voice VLAN. With both automated QoS and voice VLAN discovery, an IP phone can be automatically given the proper quality of service features and be placed in the proper voice VLAN with no manual intervention. This decreases the cost for deploying VoIP infrastructure and services, and eliminates costly configuration errors.

Integrated Power Management

Foundry provides the only fully redundant internal power management solution that spans both our high-density stackable and chassis product lines. This includes internal, hot-swappable, redundant, load sharing power supplies (both AC and DC), and power upgradeability with no system impact. In fact the same PoE daughter card is used throughout our PoE product line. This PoE upgrade can be ordered in advance or done in the field without affecting the system.

Both Foundry's stackable and chassis products fully support the 802.3af PoE standard, with integrated and redundant PoE power capabilities that are affordable, reliable, and effective. Our PoE networking solutions include support for non-802.3af compliant devices, configuration on a per-port basis, and a unique smart ports feature, which delivers proper wattage even if manually misconfigured. We also offer PoE modules for our award-winning Jetcore products, including the FastIron® and BigIron® chassis products. For equipment that does not support PoE, Foundry has an inline power injector unit that delivers full 802.3af power to your IP phones.

Converged Voice & Data Security

Foundry's VoIP ready networking solutions include our IronShield 360 security components for the protection of both Voice and Data infrastructure. IronShield 360 is a set of defense-in-depth security solutions, including:

  • L2-3 embedded wired/wireless security
  • sFlow based Closed Loop security using IronView and Snort
  • SecureIron Traffic Manager and SecureIron LAN Switch
  • Foundry Security Alliance Partners

Our security solutions include support for simultaneous 802.1x, MAC, and Web authentication, as well as multi-802.1x support per port. These features allow PC's and phones to share the same port without giving up the security needed to insure both voice and data integrity.

VoIP and Wireless Mobility

Foundry is focused on delivering both wireline and wireless IP telephony support, including support for both Layer 2 and Layer 3 wireless mobility solutions. Foundry's stackable and chassis solutions for the network edge support the addition of scalable, low-cost wireless mobility software, and our IronPoint® 200 wireless access point supports IEEE 802.11e QoS and the WiFi Alliance's Wireless Multimedia (WMM). In addition, Foundry is working with vendors that supply CDMA to WiFi mobility solutions so that our VoIP ready network infrastructure provides mobility for both the carrier based CDMA wireless network and enterprise based WiFi networks.

VoIP Partners & Interoperability

Foundry gives customers multiple purchasing options by working with best-of-breed IP telephony equipment vendors to validate the functionality, performance, and quality of our converged networking solutions on a variety of different phone and call manager/media gateway platforms. Instead of locking customers into a phone vendor, our VoIP-ready networking products are interoperable with products from a variety of vendors, including 3COM, Avaya, Cisco, Mitel, Nortel, Lucent, Alcatel, Shoretel, and Siemens. Foundry validates this interoperability through both internal testing and our partner relationships with the premier industry vendors. Our extensive experience with multiple product installations from different IP telephony vendor equipment gives customers the flexibility to choose the telephony equipment that best meets their needs.

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Related Products

Product Description
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IronView Network Manager Foundry IronView™ Network Manager (INM) allows today's networks to run at maximum efficiency by providing network administrators with effective tools for managing and configuring... Learn more

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