Foundry is launching its largest Ethernet switch to date at the Interop show this week - a 32-slot, 5.1 terabit-per-second Ethernet switch aimed at high-end data centers and campus LAN backbones. The switch vendor is also expected to announce software which turns Foundry Layer 4-7 switches into anti-spam and application firewall devices.

Slideshow: Take a closer look at Foundry's monster Ethernet switch

Foundry's BigIron RX32 supports up to 128 line-rate 10G Ethernet ports, or 768 ports of 10/100/1000Mbps Ethernet; twice the amount of its previous BigIron RX16, and more than double the number of ports supported in currently shipping high-end gear such as Force10's TeraScale, Cisco's Catalyst 6500 and Extreme's BlackDiamond. Foundry is also introducing TrafficWorks 10.0, which adds Web application firewall and spam-filtering capabilities to the ServerIron 4G switch.

"Customers have come to us because, historically, we've sold the biggest, baddest boxes," says Foundry CEO Bobby Johnson, calling the RX32 the new head of the company's high-end switch family.

Foundry says its RX32 could be used to collapse an entire LAN backbone or data center into a single chassis (or pair of chassis for redundancy). The device could also run in carrier metro Ethernet edge or core networks, aggregating Ethernet services from customers, or acting as a central hub for MPLS- or VLAN-based Ethernet VPN services.

At almost $200,000 for just the RX32 chassis (no line cards), the BigIron RX32's market may be select, but it is growing, Johnson says.

"There are a lot of customers who do need this level of performance, scalability, and port density," he says, such as large university backbones, enterprises involved with data mining, as well as government research laboratories involved in high-performance computing and clustering.

In courting theses types of customers with its new high-end switch, Foundry hopes to gain some headway in the 10G Ethernet market, where it has fallen behind Cisco and Force10 in terms of shipments and revenue, according to research from the Dell'Oro Group.

"This product is a good solid step forward" for Foundry, says Tere' Bracco, senior research director for enterprise at Current Analysis. The high port count, scale and variety of connection types make it the largest, most versatile core LAN and data center box among competitors in the rarefied market for super-high-density Ethernet boxes.