At Interop this week, products from Foundry and Nortel are expected to take their shots at Cisco, F5 and others in the WAN routing, application acceleration, and data center switching arenas while Avaya and 3Com will launch gear designed to bolster customers’ VoIP and security implementations.

Observers say Foundry's big swing - a 5-terabit, 128-port 10G Ethernet switch - could be a knockout blow to Force10, Extreme and startup Woven Systems, in high-end data center switching. At the show Foundry will launch its biggest-yet Ethernet switch - the BigIron RX32 - aimed at ultra high-density enterprise data centers, and carrier networks. The box supports up to 128 line-rate 10G Ethernet ports; twice the amount of its previous BigIron RX16, and more than double currently shipping high-end gear such as Force10's TeraScale, Cisco's Catalyst 6500 and Extreme's BlackDiamond. (only Woven Systems's EFX 1000 scales higher, to 144 10G ports).

"Customers have come to us, historically, because 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.

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 campus LAN backbones, enterprises involved with data mining, as well as research networks doing high-performance computing and clustering.

In courting theses types of customers with its 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.

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