Foundry this week launched a line of load-balancing appliances aimed at high-performance data centers in enterprise and carrier networks.

Foundry’s ServerIronGT E Series of appliances combine multi-Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet capabilities with Layer 4 load balancing and application-layer switching. The boxes are aimed at helping users reduce server hardware and lessen bandwidth needs in large data centers.

The new products include:

• ServerIronGT EGx2 – A dual-Gigabit Ethernet appliance, which can handle up to 50,000 Layer 4 connections per second.
• ServerIronGT EGx4 – A four-Gigabit Ethernet box capable of 100,000 Layer 4 connections per second, two expansion slots.
• ServerIronGT E10Gx2 – A dual-10-Gigabit Ethernet appliance capable of processing 150,000 Layer 4 connections per second.

A ServerIronGT E Series appliance (or multiple appliances) would sit in a corporate data center in front large farms of individual servers, or fronting large server consolidation boxes. Each of the appliances comes with two expansion slots that can be fitted with more ports, or redundant management modules for high availability. Redundant power supplies are also optional, which add another layer of failure protection. All of the appliances can be configured in tandem active-active, or active-standby configurations for ensuring device availability.
 
In addition to fast load balancing, the ServerIronGT E Series boxes are also capable of protecting against TCP-based SYN/ACK attack methods, where attackers try to flood a switch with malformed TCP/IP packets. Each of the new appliances can handle up to 4.5 million SYN packets per second, Foundry says.

The ServerIronGT EGx2 starts at $16,000, and the ServerIronGT EGx4 starting cost is $25,000. The 10G ServerIronGT E10Gx2 starts at $45,000. All three ServerIronGT E Series appliances will be available in July.