* Compact Gigabit Ethernet switch has option for 10 Gigabit uplinks
Foundry Networks this week unveiled a line of compact Gigabit Ethernet edge switches with optional 10 Gigabit Ethernet uplinks.
Foundry’s FastIron LS Series of switches work at 10Mbps, 100Mbps or gigabit rates, depending on what endpoints the ports are connected to and what speed those end devices can support.
The Layer 2 switches come in a box that’s one rack-unit high and 13 inches deep. They have 24 or 48 main ports, with four optical 100/1000Mbps Ethernet ports. They can also be ordered with one to three optical 10 Gigabit Ethernet modules, or they can be upgraded in the field with those ports later on.
With Gigabit Ethernet the standard offering for PCs these days, you’d expect the switches that provide that bandwidth to get smaller and to also provide uplinks at 10 Gigabit Ethernet.
Foundry is positioning the new switches both for desktop connectivity and for high-performance server connections within data centers. The company is even saying they could be used in metro-area networks, as the switches support Metro Ring Protocol for building resilient ring-based topologies, and other MAN-related protocols.
The switches draw on Foundry’s history of security its network gear, so they protect against certain denial-of-service attacks, embed sFlow traffic monitoring and enable standards-based network access control with multi-endpoint authentication. The company says spanning tree Root Guard and BPDU guard protect the network from protocol-level attacks. And the switches support MAC-based virtual LANs for MAC-based access control.
The 24-port version starts at $3,000, and the 48-port version starts at $4,500. A 10 Gigabit Ethernet modules is $1,000.
