Foundry expands switch line for IPv6

Foundry Networks this week introduced a series of routing switches with an emphasis on support for IPv6, the next generation of the Internet's routing protocol.

Foundry's FastIron Edge XE builds on the FastIron Edge X Series, adding hardware-based routing for IPv6 in a compact edge switch. The series includes three models, including 24- and 48-port models, that can be upgraded with a two-port optical 10 Gigabit Ethernet module.

The switches in the series are intended to help businesses migrate to IPv6. They have dual stacks for IPv4 and IPv6 and enable what Foundry calls a "graceful transition" from one to the other.

Foundry says the independent forwarding tables for IPv4 and IPv6 eliminate potential processing conflicts or possible performance degradation.

The switches are available in a 1.5 rack-unit box. They support up to 512,000 IPv4 routes and up to 64,000 IPv6 routes in hardware forwarding memory. Foundry says they also support up to 1 million BGP route advertisements in software, for storing and processing multiple views of the full Internet routing table.

The switches can forward up to 136 million packets per second and have a non-blocking architecture for wire-speed throughput. There are 32MB packet buffers on both ingress and egress.

One model has 24 ports of 10/100/1000Mbps copper-based Ethernet. A second model has 48 ports of copper-based Ethernet. And the third model has 24 ports of fiber-based Ethernet, with SFP ports supporting both 100Mbps and 1000Mbps pluggable SFP transceivers.

The series ships next month, starting at $14,995.

Jeff Caruso is site editor at Network World.