Foundry Networks this week said that online advertising management provider Right Media is using Foundry's 10 Gigabit Ethernet LAN and application switches.

Right Media says its Web site serves 45 billion impressions per month and is growing. Its platform ranks in the top 50 Web sites for total data traffic delivered. So the company built up four globally distributed data centers to support it.

Right Media is using Foundry's BigIron RX switches for its data center backbone, Foundry's FastIron Edge X Series switches for server aggregation at gigabit rates, and Foundry's ServerIron 450 application switches to accelerate Web services and ensure their availability.

There is a good deal of future-proofing being built in. Right Media implied it does not need the 10 Gigabit Ethernet today, but having it available means not having to worry about network upgrades for quite some time.

The BigIron RX can drive 4.62 terabits per second in a standard telco rack, and Foundry points out that its power consumption is low for its size. It consumes 15.8 kilowatts, or 7 watts per Gigabit Ethernet port, which Foundry claims is 40% less than power usage in other vendors' products.

The ServerIron switches allow the server farm to grow to hundreds or thousands of servers, balancing loads among them, or even among the distributed data centers through global load balancing. Additional data centers can be added to the global load-balancing network. Disaster recovery is built into the setup; if one data center becomes unavailable, the other data centers pick up the slack.

Jeff Caruso is site editor at Network World.