Foundry continues to update switches

Foundry Networks closed 2005 with a pair of product enhancements that could have been lost in the holiday news slowdown – one is a module for its high-end Layer 2/3 switch, and the other is network intrusion detection and prevention for its switches.

Foundry was busy last month with several LAN-related announcements.

Later in December, the company introduced a 48-port 10/100/1000 Mbps module for its BigIron RX Series of Layer 2/3 Ethernet switches. With the new module, a single switch can now support up to 768 ports, and up to 2,304 ports can be supported within a seven-foot equipment rack.

Foundry says the module can pack in these ports without compromising QoS control, latency or throughput, as all ports are non-blocking and wire-speed. The module uses mini RJ-21 connectors and cables for cable management, so that more ports can use fewer cables. Foundry also touts the power consumption of the module as being especially low; with 768 Gigabit Ethernet ports, a BigIron RX-16 uses less than 7 watts per port.

The module will ship this quarter for $15,995.

For intrusion detection and prevention, Foundry is using sFlow for real-time traffic monitoring on the company’s switches and routers, its IronView Network Manager software, and the open source intrusion software Snort.

Foundry says sFlow data collected from the network goes to Foundry’s IronView Network Manager, which pre-processes the data and forwards it to the Snort engine. Snort uses a database of attack signatures to identify attacks, and then lets the management software know when it has found something. IronView in turn lets network managers know and leaves it to them to take action.