* Schools deploy Foundry 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches
Foundry Networks continues to roll 10 Gigabit Ethernet out to various organizations. This time the network hardware company has announced that two educational institutions have separately opted for its gear.
The first is Vanderbilt University (whose football team, coincidentally, was thrashed by my alma mater a couple weeks ago, but that’s neither here nor there). The university’s Advanced Computing Center for Research and Education is installing Foundry’s BigIron RX-16, which you may recall is also going into Internet exchanges.
In Vanderbilt’s case, the RX-16 becomes the core infrastructure for the university’s high-performance computing cluster. The computing center is used by researchers in areas ranging from genetics, molecular biology and physiology to high-energy physics, electrical engineering, chemical engineering and math.
Vanderbilt says it needed a switch to scale up to hundreds of Gigabit Ethernet ports and dozens of 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports while keeping latency low. Plus, it had to be able to work continuously. The RX-16 has redundancy features and “graceful” software failover capabilities, and it boots up in less than 45 seconds.
Meanwhile, Southern California’s El Monte Union High School District went with Foundry’s BigIron MG8 switches for its backbone. Foundry FastIron SuperX edge switches connect to a 10 Gigabit Ethernet core network supported by the BigIron. The school system is also using Foundry access points to create a wireless LAN.
On top of that network, El Monte is running voice over IP via Mitel gear, providing VoIP to 8,000 users distributed among seven high school campuses.
El Monte is one of the first high school districts to deploy a 10 Gigabit Ethernet backbone. What are they going to fill that pipe with? Multimedia, primarily. High school isn’t what it used to be.
