Foundry Networks went “old school” on last week’s Interop with a flurry of product announcements that brought to mind the good old days of big trade shows and the corresponding big news.

Although there were several announcements, I think they really got buried in all the main coverage of the Interop show dominated by Cisco and Juniper. By the way, you can find all that coverage here:
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2005/interop.html

The centerpiece of Foundry’s announcements was the BigIron RX series of Layer 2/3 Ethernet switches intended for enterprise backbones and data centers - as well as service providers and high-performance computing environments.

There are three chassis-based models in this series. The BigIron RX-4 can hold four half-slot port modules and can move up to 384G bit/sec, the RX-8 can hold eight half-slot port modules and move 768G bit/sec, and the RX-16 can hold (you guessed it) 16 half-slot port modules and move 1.536T bit/sec.

Foundry boasts that the switch’s throughput per rack unit is the highest in the industry, at 110G bit/sec. It also boasts that the switch is ready for next steps over and above 10G bit/sec ports; it can handle 40G bit/sec and 100G bit/sec connections.

Each supports redundant switch fabrics, redundant management modules and redundant power supply components. The RX-16 can even support 3:1 switch fabric redundancy; if one or more switch fabrics fail, the switch will carry on, albeit at a reduced capacity. All the modules, power supplies and fans are hot-swappable.

At the Interop show, Foundry and Spirent Communications demonstrated the BigIron RX in action. Spirent had connected its 10 Gigabit Ethernet test system to an RX-16, sending gobs of data across 64 ports of 10 Gigabit Ethernet. The companies claimed that the throughput was 952 million packets per second, the line-rate capacity of all those ports.

The BigIron RX-series will ship in July, and pricing will be announced at that time.

More Foundry news in the next issue.

Jeff Caruso is site editor at Network World.