Foundry Networks this week is expected to launch a new series of lower-cost, modular switches aimed at customers that want to speed 10G adoption in their business networks.

For organizations with ballooning desktop bandwidth needs, Foundry's SuperX switches could provide high-density 10/100/1000M bit/sec ports with Power over Ethernet (PoE) on the end-user side, with 10G Ethernet uplinks for connecting directly to a LAN backbone switch. The SuperX boxes also can come configured as high-density, 10G aggregation or LAN core devices, Foundry says.

The SuperX chassis come in three flavors: FastIron, TurboIron and BigIron, aimed at wiring closets, 10G aggregation and backbone deployments, respectively. While the switches can pack high switching capacity and port densities, Foundry says the chassis are compact, fitting into 6U vertical space.

The SuperX FastIron can be deployed in wiring closets, where large amounts of 10/100/1000 ports are needed - up to 96 ports can be supported per chassis. A $500 daughtercard also can be added to each 24-port, triple-speed module for adding PoE. Dual-port 10G uplink cards also can be used to link a wiring closet to a distribution or core switch.

The SuperX TurboIron is a pre-configured chassis with 16 ports of 10G Ethernet and is targeted at aggregating multiple 10G switches.

While Foundry is pushing bigger bandwidth into a small chassis, it's also pushing its 10G pricing on the SuperX series, down to about $2,500 per port, without optics. This comes in at about $1,000 less than recently announced 10G pricing from Extreme Networks and $4,500 less than Cisco.

The University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute (USC ISI) deployed a beta version of the SuperX TurboIron and tested it for aggregating links from several 10G-enabled Foundry switches already in production. The switches connect supercomputing clusters inside the research center.

"It used to be just a few years ago when you paid over $40,000 for a single 10G Ethernet port," says Richard Nelson, director of computing at USC ISI, who has used 10G since before it became a standard in 2002. Nelson says the SuperX TurboIron box's price of about $5,000 per 10G port, with optics, "is pretty good."

He says the SuperX switches' compact size also would be helpful in a wiring closet deployment.

"It's not a very big box," he says. "It can fit into a lot of different locations, such as small wiring closets that might already be packed with equipment."